Go Forth and Mutilate

Okay, so you're in a bad death metal band. Not content to just have bad practices and play bad shows, you feel the overwhelming NEED to release a bad album. Well... does it have to be so long? There's lots of really GOOD death metal albums out there that are only a half hour long, or even less! So why does Spinecast's terribly boring sophomore release have to be over fifty fucking minutes long? It gets unbearable long before it gets even close to being over; the sheer tedium of this music never lets up for even a moment, and it's not as though it suddenly takes an upswing of quality in the second half. If this was a little bit shorter, maybe it wouldn't be so disastrous, but it's a fucking monolithic slab of boredom and cringing despair and I have no choice but to imagine this is an actual attack on anyone unfortunate enough to listen to this.

That's all hyperbole, of course. Spinecast, like almost any band on Crash, isn't terrible- just mediocre and without a trace of real creativity anywhere in their sound. I'll give the band credit and say that some of the things I hear wrong with this release are pretty unique, though. For instance: the fact that when the lead guitar pops in for a solo, it's like three times louder than the rest of the music, reducing every other instrument to a totally indecipherable background hum while it soaks up the foreground, making for a completely jarring break in the flow of the songs. Or how the drum production seems irritatingly cheap, especially in conjunction with the overloud and not particularly well-delivered vocal performance on display. Indeed, the exact way that Spinecast manages to suck is a lot different from many of their contemporaries, and for that I have to give them credit.

Spinecast basically reminds me of another bad Crash death metal band, Spinal Cord (quite a coincidence in name there,) who use some of the same musical techniques to a similarly useless end. Spinecast plays a lightly black metal influenced form of death metal (mostly coming from Dissection to these ears, and not enough at all to call this 'black/death') which also throws some notes to thrash, but for the most part stays completely indistinguishable. The similarity to Spinal Cord comes in the form of some ill-advised jaunts into pseudo-progressive territory thanks to the bass guitar. I don't have a problem with an audible, creative bass role in death metal- quite the contrary, I always like it when the underappreciated instrument is a significant player- but the bass is so loud and the basslines so ostentatious that they just end up distracting from the bulk of the riffs more often than not. Exacerbating this is the band's tendency to lurch into open, vaguely prog sections with lots of shimmering cymbal runs and weird, incongruous riffs which have nothing to do with the bulk of the fairly straightforward death metal which makes up this album. They're playing at something beyond their grasp and it shows very clearly.

Really though the death metal itself isn't interesting enough to sustain the listener's interest, so maybe it's a fair attempt to increase the liveliness of this music. I can't immediately compare this to any other death metal band- I guess hints of 'Vile'-era Cannibal Corpse and maybe older Morbid Angel are present- but it sounds too streamlined and modern for either of those, with goofy, go-nowhere tremolo lines making up the majority of the riffs and a Decapitated sense of groovy drumming dominating the rhythm section. It really has no personality despite sounding like no other band in particular; that's because Spinecast just sounds like death metal. Not an idea within death metal, not a group of musicians making their own style of death metal, just Death Metal and nothing else. Even the vague hints of experimentation, like the spoken word vocals which pop up on 'Complete My Deeds,' are completely in line with horribly dated death metal experimentation ala 'Embalmed Existence.' It's pretty dire.

Just throw this on the Crash pile with the rest of them, kids. Nothing to see here- just another mediocre band that got caught up in the Crash machine and never had (or probably deserved) a chance.