Grenouer- The odour o’ folly/ Gravehead.
Posted by AlMachine on Monday, January 25, 2010



From the sleeve artwork and the completely illegible logo (illegible due to its poor choice of font, not its spiky death metal nature), I had little hope for this record and was not proved wrong.

The album is a reissue of two albums bundled together on one disk. Reissue implying that people who didn’t manage to obtain these recordings first time round, really need to this time. Unfortunately, why anyone would want to actually pay money for this by-the-numbers example of standard death metal is beyond me.

The track starts as an intro, unsurprisingly a sample from somewhere or other of someone being sentenced the death penalty in an American courtroom. This jumps straight into a standard metal riff and heavily triggered drums. From the off they let you know that there will be no surprises here.

This to me is an example of what is currently very wrong with metal. It is utterly lacking in substance and innovation. This could be any band from anywhere in the world and recorded at any point in the last decade. Nothing new is being brought to the table here; no innovation, no progression, it’s almost as if bands are scared to break the mould now and no, using badly sequenced orchestras is not progression. No, pretending you’re a prog band and occasionally having an electro acoustic intro is not progression. In no way are these elements, as heavily and badly used as they are, helping to develop an increasingly stagnating and cliché ridden genre. Not that these elements are present on this record, god forbid they stray from their cookie monster vocals and blast beats. I sincerely don’t understand why the existence of a band like this is necessary.

Four tracks or so in, they use another sample, the first break in the monotony. This time from a battle scene taken from any war film made in the last half century.

Metal has hit a stale point in its history now. The formula is too easy to record, produce, and write. With software capable of creating music in almost every home in the developed world, this is not excusable in my eyes. People capable of making the music they love should be using this equipment to experiment with its sounds at their leisure. Something which historically has only been possible for people with unlimited access to high end studio equipment and a great deal of financial backing. In this culture of personality and vague celebrity, people should be defining the sounds that define them as an individual.

Looking from a wider perspective: collectively as opposed to individually, metal is supposed to serve as an alternative to mainstream culture, a revolt against it, and with popular music being as bad as it is now, based entirely on heavily embellished game shows and photo fit pop rock groups, the underground metal scene should be thriving, producing some of the most visceral, innovative and passionate music of the new century. Instead it’s almost as if it’s playing along. Too scared to do anything different, to approach genuinely controversial subjects of any kind. Proving its self to be just as conservative as what it rails against.

Nothing on this record is even particularly aggressive, leaving it little more than pantomime.

As the genre approaches it’s flashpoint, Metal needs a wake up call. A kick in the arse before the thousands of sweaty boys, forming bands inspired by sweaty boys making music for other sweaty boys reaches total saturation and completely burns out, becoming the joke that glam rock and eighties hair metal fell into. Before Penelope Spheeris decides to add a third part to The Decline of Western Civilization.

I stopped listening when they covered Ah-Ha…


Michael Cowell

0/10


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