Band:
Sven De Caluwe (vocals)
Eran Segal (guitars)
Michael Wilson (guitars)
JB van de Wal (bass)
Ken Bedene (drums)
Discography:
The Purity Of Perversion (1999)
Engineering The Dead (2001)
Goremageddon: The Saw And The Done (2003)
The Haematobic (EP 2004)
The Archaic Abattoir (2006)
Slaughter & Apparatus: A Methodical Overture (2007)
Strychnine.213 (2008)
Coronary Reconstruction (EP 2010)
Guests:
Jason Netherton (vocals on 12)
Keijo Niinimaa (vocals on 11)
Trevor Strnad (vocals on 7)
Julien Truchan (vocals on 3)
Info:
Jacob Hansen (producer)
Justin Osbourn (artwork)
Released 20/1-2012
Reviewed 25/4-2012
The album starts quite promising with an intro spanning about a minute where they've montaged sounds from different sources of popular culture most of us recognize. But as soon as this intro ends, the EKG turns negative drastically and every attempts to revive it are after a few minutes of this album completely hopeless. Mostly the music is fast, dark and monotonous and I'm not the least surprised as the last song begins and find that it's called Endstille (even though this particular song isn't following that pattern) since Endstille is pretty much the definition of fast, dark and monotonous (further reading, do a Hallowed search for Endstille on our main page).
Honestly, I must say this album pisses me off! It's packed with garbage on crap on piles of shit but despite this, now and then it flashes by with a couple of genius elements. You only need to look at the surface to see what I mean - take the title on both album and songs that suggest something pretty deep, intelligent and clever. Like putting a Russian song title in the middle of everything, or all the titles with latin inspiration. And beside the somewhat Breivikish theme, they've made quite a thoroughly investigations when they've written the song The Kallinger Theory, as it's a "documentary" song about the serial killer Joseph Kallinger. All this goes in contrast to the "normal" shit-albums that normally lacks every form of intelligens besides coming with a shit-ugly cover and idiotic song titles because as I said, this album has some pretty clever things and despite the not so appealing cover, the artwork is still pretty good looking and well made. And then of course the concluding song, which is a nice song and comes with no Endstille-relations at all… or almost, at least.
Following the intro the album takes on two songs with an insane tempo and the drums bangs like bursts of machine guns while the guitars seems to be stuck on an infinite loop of a half second that repeats indefinite like a CD with a scratch that the reader can't get by. The third real song (Coronary Reconstruction) begins just like the previous two but less than two minutes in to the song it changes character and lower the tempo for a more technical kind of music with more variation and structure. Fecal Forgery follows this and it's another song beginning with this extreme tempo, but also this song changes character and becomes pretty melodic and interesting with only the annoying lead guitars disturbing the harmony every now and then. Still, regardless of the guitars, this is probably the best song on the album, along with Of Scabs And Boils that follows and I think these two songs proves that this band can play good music if they want. The problem is that they've chosen not to do that and as a whole this album is mostly pure garbage.
At track seven it's back to what it was in the beginning and the frantic drumming is mixed with terrible non-musical vocals and unmusical guitars with absolute melodic absence. You will probably only find Aborted appealing if you're the kind of person that wants music without any form of emotion, movement or rhythmadressed in your body. This is an album that physically gives you head ache (at least me) and makes you feel mentally bad and these last couple of months has been among the worst I've experienced for quite a while. With the best of the songs hardly passing the bottom marker for approval and no instrumental performances being particularly notable, only the production makes some sort of memorable impression with a pretty decent sound quality and strong sound. However, an album can't only rely on a good production since good productions don't make good music. A bad production can ruin good music, but a good production can't make bad music good.
Not being a fan of this band from before I can't say I've heard very much by this band before this album and I haven't made any efforts to change that after struggling through Aborted on 'Global Flatline' these last couple of months. In my world, this album would have been better if aborted. But since they didn't abort the recording, I've decided to abort my listening to the album. This is clearly below decent and a clear fail!
HHHHHHH