The Chief of the Savage

The cover of this was just crazy enough to get me interested - I thought maybe it would be like Tlateotocani - but actually it's just the typical slop, it's exactly what people think of as bad NSBM: too distorted to hear what's going on, and so repetitive you wouldn't want to anyway.

There's a huge amount of background noise that nearly overpowers the music. The first few times I heard it, it was hard for me to even hear the instruments. Only on certain portions of songs when he uses higher reverb on the guitars can you properly hear them. Some of those high-reverb riffs are enjoyable and that's what saves this from zero percent.

It's made with a drum machine which isn't that big of a deal to me. As I said though, there's so much background noise, so you can't hear the drum machine at all aside from the artificial ping-ping-ping of the crash cymbals. Actual drumming? Not audible.

The vocals are basically a thrash shout, a little hoarser than that, but not properly a growl or scream. It's so repetitive. Each song is essentially played twice just to fill time, and for minutes at a time he'll drone on repeating the same three lines over and over and over and over until you're ready to blow your brains out.

You can also clearly hear when it was looped with software - a skip and then the music repeats. Lazy, sloppy, embarrassing. Also there's a five minute sample of airplane sounds overlaid to Hollywood Indian "hey-yo hey-yo hey-yo" chanting, in case for some reason you wanted to listen to that.

Skip this crap. There's plenty of good Native American black metal out there.