Dead Verses

You know, I read some of the reviews on here of these guys and I'm a little suspect of who wrote them. Let me get to the point. This isn't good, it will never be good. Leviathan's Mandible is a band best left as a footnote, being generous. The fact that they're referred to as 'experimental' in their listing is laughable. I didn't know experimental meant lyrics based on outdated 'brutal' ideas with no guitars and a live drummer who can fill fairly well but can't hold a beat to save his life. Pretty sure he's not on this album, not like it matters. Anyway, let me break it down what you'll find in Dead Verses.

First, the most important area, the music. If you're not familiar with them, let me shorten it to two words. Crappy grind. I'll get into it in the next paragraph when I discuss the time issue, but this amounts to generally really short songs that never go anywhere, typical vocals, and typical drums. And of course, no bass, because that's more 'grind' than fleshing out the sound and giving it depth. The quality on this album is downright terrible. It's often difficult to make out any of the guitars because of the low quality, the drums are sometimes indistinct or the cymbals break in and cover over everything, and the vocals have that typical, grind rasping followed by roaring that scream 'pay attention to me my lyrics are brutal and deep' but you don't understand them anyway. He can definitely sing, but it's nothing to get excited over. Just another bunch of roars and screams with some pig squeals for kicks.

Second, the running time. The majority of the songs are under two minutes, some less than one. Some people don't mind this sort of thing, but I do because all the songs sound similar and there's little presence or development. It's guitars, drums, blah singing and then repeat. Wow, talk about experimenting. To me, lots of these bands doing these short, bullshit songs are trying to steer away from the reality that they can't write anything. The only bands I've liked in this vein are those that do it because one, they know they're idiots (such as Gore Beyond Necropsy), or two they're just being funny, which itself isn't easy to pull off. Leviathan's Mandible, however, is serious. If you're going to be serious, how about developing your sound and making it progress over more than thirty to fifty seconds of cheap break downs and vocals that happen so fast you miss them?

Third, presentation. Horrid. Some of these song titles sound like they were written by looking up random words in the dictionary and then adding something that sounded 'grind' or 'brutal'. Check out tracks like 'A Virgin With Stockholm Syndrome'. Do you guys even know what that means? Something tells me you didn't even look it up. What exactly are you getting at? Overall, Dead Verses doesn't appear to have any real direction to it. It's more like 'here's a bunch of songs we've been meaning to lay down and burn onto a CD, let's do that after recording it on a tape player'. And then you have tracks with titles such as 'Effervescence' which make you think of the sweet, brutal fizz of flu medicine. I mean, come on, these are some of the most infantile titles I've ever freaking heard. And the lyrics? Here's a sample: "We'll kick her in the dead [sic], She'll come home dead, Metal destroyers, Have come to take your life." I swear to god that's real shit right there, don't even need to comment. If you want to call your music 'experimental' at least do something original or give the lyrics more depth. Very poor presentation, but the art's okay considering the quality of the recording.

As a whole, Dead Verses is better left off where the adjective so conveniently suggests, dead. I have no clue what the general direction was supposed to be here, the presentation is poorly thought out, if thought out at all, the songs are all way too short, the quality is low, the sound is redundant, the lyrics are terrible, it's just an overall poor release from a band that never seems to get anywhere. After listening to this album, checking out some more of their stuff, and looking at some glamorous reviews and coddling on the internet, now I know why. It only got a 10% from me because it exists, otherwise 0.