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Mammoth Grinder: Extinction Of Humanity Death Metal Cyclopean Records, Relapse Records December 15th, 2009
- Also released on Cassette format with diffferent artwork through Ghosthunt Records. Originally posted on December 4th, 2009 | ||
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Review
Originally a Hardcore band, Mammoth Grinder have changed their sound up and, over time, became a Death Metal band. It's pretty clear that the band has not strayed away completely from their Hardcore roots with the release of their latest album, Extinction Of Humanity, bringing a very old-school Death Metal sound to the board, with some Sludge elements thrown in at times for atmosphere. With some great music and vocals on the album, it's clear the band has talent, as well as some time to kill. The first thing you'll notice when Extinction Of Humanity kicks on will easily be the raw production quality. The quality does work well with everything from the heavily distorted guitars to the not too far in the background echoing shouting vocals, presenting a rather successful attempt at taking the olden days of Death Metal and bringing them to life with their own little musical twist, giving off the quality of a cassette or even an old LP. Right from the start, once your ears relax a bit from the guitar feedback that kicks the album off, you're greeted with the very heavy track "Total Extinction", which is one of the few more straight forward Death Metal tracks on here. After this point, the album doesn't really slow down, but it starts to utilize some Sludge elements that will either sound good at that time, or sound like a waste of time. "Sentenced To Hell" is easily one of the best tracks, and perhaps most aggrivating tracks due to how intense it is, and features a nice, though abrupt, Sludge section a little more then half way through. The feedback that starts off this song goes right through your brain and, given all the feedback you had to listen to already, it probably will give you a headache until the blistering metal starts. Then a bit more feedback, slow Sludge, more feedback to bleed into the instrumental Sludge Metal track "Resurfacing", but still features more blasted feedback. The feedback is pretty much everywhere, on each song, sometimes more then once, or even acts as a bridge between tracks. While the bridging of tracks with it is nice and gives the feeling that this is an actual performance that was recorded and that the band didn't really take a break during this phase, it's also unbelievably irritating because of how high pitched it is in comparison to everything else, leaving you kind of dreading the next track to see how bad it gets since almost every track that comes next has more, or just sounds worse with it. Once you hit "Frozen", your mind can rest a bit and focus more on the music then dreading the next track's insane amount of feedback and how many tylenol you may have to pop after this album is done. "Frozen", "Devoured By Fear" and "Life Returns" carry the same heavy and/or ominous feel the album started with on "Total Extinction" and "Societal Collapse", with "Devoured By Fear" being a slower track that really sticks out compared to the rest of the album. Of course, you have the bleeding feedback from one track to another, but thankfully that's it. But the next thing you know the CD is over, and you ponder just how much metal you heard versus guitar feedback since the album runs just a little over twenty minutes in length. Extinction Of Humanity has the potential to be a kick ass release, especially with the band's ability to blend the old school Swedish Death Metal sound with elements of Sludge and Hardcore. The problem is the overall usage of the latter two. While, for the most part, Extinction Of Humanity sounds great and often can be a very intense listening experience, there's just way too much feedback utilized to merge tracks together or used as a trick to extend the life of the tracks against a very out-of-nowhere Sludge "breakdown", when it's the ambience and overall Sludge style through the album that really pushes the music over the top. If the band didn't focus so much on earsplitting, migraine inducing shrieks in each song, and left it to a little bit between tracks like they did for some of the beginning and ending tracks on the release, we could have had a winner here. While it may not value for most people at full retail value, it's definitely worth checking out, or at least hitting an MP3 store to sample the goods.
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