Tuesday, February 05, 2008

WHY I LOVE BRAIN DRILL

Cosmo issued a challenge (to me and one other dude) to "convince me that Brain Drill isn't just a bunch of noise. I like things as extreme as they come, but this just hurts my head, so to speak."

Well, I've been listening to Apocalyptic Feasting pretty much every day since I got it in the mail, so here's the story.

I don't think it's just a bunch of noise at all. As gritty technical death metal goes, in fact, it's extraordinarily tight. They have some rough edges on their sound - there are times, in fact, when the guitar/drums interaction reminds me of early (think 2nd 18/04 or Asristil Vrieldox, not OV) Orthrelm. Only one of the usual DM caveats applies to these guys: I find the incomprehensibility of the lyrics to be a mercy (why can't more tech-death bands be like Neuraxis and sing about something other than disembowelment?). The other problem I have with a lot of DM, that it's too punishingly mixed, is absolutely not the case on Apocalyptic Feasting; it's super-clean, with each instrument getting its own spot in the mix, and the drums sound particularly nice. Not Decapitated nice, but miles better than the pencil-on-desktop rattling of, say, Vital Remains. And the bassist gets loving attention in more than a few spots, which as we all know has been a rare thing in DM since Atheist broke up the first time. Seriously, folks, if you're a death metal fan and you're not rockin' Brain Drill, you need to re-evaluate.

By the way, Decrepit Birth's Diminishing Between Worlds is great technical death, too. So's the Neuraxis live album, and so's the Infected Malignity's Re:Bel EP, both of which I got in today's mail. About the only thing I've heard recently that I think is overrated, and don't recommend, is the Ambient Death EP, Time Eclipse. No, they don't sound like anybody else currently working, but that doesn't mean they sound good. Pass on that one.

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