Human Error

These were the grand old days when grindcore was still unlabeled and still unperfected. At this time, this style of music Unseen Terror play was called "extreme metal", which many saw as a blend of metal (thrash) and some hardcore influences. Nowadays, this music on the album "Human Error" is known as grindcore, but in Unseen Terror's case, they blended loads of technical thrash guitar riffs.

What we have here are two lads at the time who recorded this album because they've been offered a record deal from Earache records. They didn't have a bass player and couldn't find a stable one to stick with, so the members (which consisted of Shane Embury of later Napalm Death fame and Mitch Dickenson of Heresy fame) recorded the album all on their own with Shane handling drums and Mitch carrying guitar, bass and vocal duties.

There are some interesting aspects of this recording, and some which are quite... well, lame. Firstly, many people know Shane for being a big man playing bass. Prior to him playing bass, he played drums as mentioned before. His drumming skill is not what we may call technical nowadays but for it's time, the drumming was pretty technical. His drumming style consisted of mostly blast beats and "chugga chugga" style drum beats that's very common in thrash metal. It's very fast paced and usually is relentless; there’s no resting or slow moment with his drumming style. Did I mention that his drumming is dead on and almost sounds too programmed on a drum machine? Not bad for a person who plays bass nowadays.

Secondly, the production reeks of treble noise; it's flat sounding, giving it that "old school" feel to it. This is not being regarded as bad production at all. The album has a crisp sound to it, there is no fuzz to be found or white noise in the background like found on other early incantations of grindcore music (think Napalm Death's "Scum" or Repulsion's "Horrified.") It still maintains a raw aspect to the production, where the vocals sound like they're done in a spacious booth, and the drums sound very dense (they sound like plastic cans being pounded away!) There is no echo to the drumming or drive to the guitar tone. The music ironically has this clean and nice old school feel to it.

The best way to sum up the sound of this album is saying it's what Heresy would sound if they would have played with more metal balls attached to their gonads. This is Heresy's metal brother, harmonizing the speed and hardcore grunt style of Heresy with touches of Repulsion-meets-Nuclear Assault rawness. The music is predominantly multiple schizo-thrash riffs played over blast beats and grunts uttered over the technicality. The riffs really are impressive sounding, coming from a person who played in a hardcore band like Heresy and accordingly not being at the ranks of riff masters like US thrash metal band Dark Angel. You can count usually a total of a good 7-13 riffs found in each song; not bad at all considering how short most of these songs are.

My only real complaint with the release is the grunt style vocals. I actually love the hardcore style grunt vocals, especially when they're in metal bands like this one, but the vocals lack pitch. They're pretty monotonous; it sounds like Mitch stood in the vocal booth trying to kept up with the speed of the music with his grunts more than actually singing to the music. They have no range or pitch and are consistent. After a while, the music is enjoyable but the vocals ruin the fast, mosh-ful atmosphere of the music with the spoken-style vocals.

Also, the music sounds pretty "flat" because you could hardly hear a bass. This isn't that big of a flaw because the flat, dull sound on the album adds to the "old schoolness" of the album sound as I mentioned before. Though I have to admit that some songs overused the blast beat style drumming and sometimes can be one dimensional. You can tell when Shane will blast beat, then go into a timpani drum role and then the "chugga chugga" style drumming. Then again, I'm not too sure if drums are Shane's tools of the trade (bass seems to be his instrument if you ask me) so I'm not going to be too anal about his drumming style because it's still enjoyable.

For a recording done by two guys in a few days, this is definitely not bad at all. It's technical in it's own sense but don't be too misled by this label today because there are far more technical bands than this of course. Just keep in mind that if you're going to listen to "Human Error", it's presenting what was once known as technical style metal and not what it's known for today. Now go and thrash your brains out to this stuff.

Oh and Garfield for President! Yay!


Ear Candy: Unseen Terror, Ignorant Scene, Garfield for President, Winds Of Pestilence, In A Shallow Grave...