The Malignity Born from Despair

How familiar are you with the Japanese, besides Anime and Manga pornos, Sushi, samurais and the sick and perverted taste in entertaining the inhabitants of that earthquake plagued country of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world's most terrifying sects and the right place to do a live show and a DVD shoot? Well, now you will be introduced to a very sick, perverted, plaguing, shaking and entertaining band, that comes from no other place but tht home of the katana swinging motherfukkers - Infected Malignity. Right from the home label, Unmatched Brutality Records of one of the most brutal bands to date, Brodequin, comes another great and brilliant "opus de maligni" - work of malignancy.

The band is a three-piece, sound as if they were a hybrid of Deeds of Flesh's andPyrexia's music, melting the best parts of both bands into one brutal and fast combination of double bass rape, slick guitar dicing into pieces the whole music. The whole music and sound is straight forward Death Metal, not leaving the opportunity to avoid getting dragged into a plastic bag, driven to the seaside and thrown intothe cold water, where you will sure drown and die. These guys ahve some song arrangements, which other bands can only look forward to achieve. But the actually don't invent anything new or original, as this has been overplayed and done like a million times, but it's done good and professional (I actually think that all riffs and arrangements in BDM are already done, so it's all just 'copy-paste' work, but it works for some).

The specific sound, that in some way reminds of Pyrexia, gives this band a special priority before all other bands that sound like Deeds of Flesh, Brodequin, and bla bla bla..., they got the right approach, not trying to sound like the bands they like, but try to reach their level of brutality, speed and technicality, and actually reach this easily. The drummer does't blast the whole time, although he seems to have attended the 'Mike Hamilton Higher School of Blast Beats' and graduated with Magna Cum Lauda - perfect and significatn blasts where you want to hear them, sometimes interflecting with other fast rhythms, to get a deeper contrast. Means, the guy has learned and is able to play more than a fast double bass and more than 2000 kbpm on the snare. Technic motherfukker!

The rest of the band has special powers too, like the Anime cartoon heroes, and switch from hyper-fast to hyper-warp-fast, and then back to slow chuggy rhythms, that make you just nod and wanna tear your muscles from the bones. The guitar player knows more than how to hack your computer, get into a full bus, make your sushi delicious, and beat the crap out of you. He knows how to play interesting Brutal Death Metal, without repetition and creating boredom.
The man behinf the four-string just does his work, without flaws, but has no special powers beyond the usual "Djn-Djn-Djn" effects.

And as usual, we got the heroes' assisstent - ULTRA LOW GUTTURALS, being the most important member of the crew, with occasional shrieks and yellings. The vocals are effectless, unprocessored and fukking brutal. That's the best you can have from a band, coming from the home coutry of digital voice effects and drum machines.

All in all - a goddamn super, hyper-warp-speed Brutal Death Metal record, that should already be a part of your BDM collection.

It's always amusing when a new subgenre or stylistic concept emerges and then immediately dies from it's own corpulence (metalcore, industrial black metal, extreme doom, etc.). Slam death is no different. In the brief period of time that it's been recognized as a genuine stylistic diversion, it's gone from being a reasonably popular concept, to one nearly universally reviled. So what explains this rather abrupt change?

Well, the answer is pretty obvious: it had no where to go. When a style is so focused on a single element (in slam death's case, the breakdown), that eventually becomes the ONLY focus. Thus, the style becomes no more than a competition over who could have the slowest, most downtuned breakdowns, which isn't bad in and of itself, but eventually came to the detriment of the songs as a whole.

Now, what does any of this have to do with Japanese brutal death metallers Infected Malignity, you might ask? Well, because Infected Malignity, much like Colombian band Amputated Genitals, seem to represent a growing 'post-slam death' style. While Amputatated Genitals does this through adding bizarre melodic intervals, Infected Malignity does it through simultaneously mocking and revering the concept of slam death by executing it almost flawlessly, but to absolutely ridiculous extremes.

Take opener 'Anathatized Vision', which from the first note you can feel the sarcasm radiating off of. Immediately you're confronted by a small army of pinch harmonics, including one riff exclusively composed of them! The impossiby slow breakdowns also make their appearance, though not as strongly as on later songs such as 'Reflected Loss', with the guitars literally playing at funeral doom pace.

Infected Malignity could generally be seen as a fairly even mix of Despised Icon and Suffocation. The heavy, claustrophobic with fragments of discordant melody of the former fuses nicely with Mullen-style vocals and slightly more frantic percussion. However, they seem to pay tribute to numerous styles and bands: the awkwardly protracted sample of 'Desperate Death' takes a shot at goregrind; the grooves in 'Revenge To Capitalism' and 'Retaliate Against The Pain' could easily belong to Aborted or Inhume, respectively.

Really, what separates Infected Malignity from a legion of other brutal death metal bands (which, were it another time, Infected Malignity would be recognized as; of course, distrtust of breakdowns has grown so severe that any DM band that isn't Wormed will be branded with the 'slam' label) is their ability to function and flourish within the confines of their genre without enslaving themselves to it's conventions. Small things that the band does, such as using blast beats instead of double bass in breakdowns or the occasional atmospheric riff function very well in these tracks' context. On top of this, they seem to actually care about their songs as a whole, evidenced by the simple fact that the blasting portions are just as interesting as the breakdowns.

As almost all albums though, 'The Malignity Born From Despair' is not flawless. The vocals, while excellent for what they are, lack variation and could benefit from the use of an additional style. The drumming too could use more eclectic stylings; some of the best moments on the album are when the blasting stops and old-school hardcore rhythms are used. Finally, the guitar tone could be changed; a tighter, more percussive sound would be to the album's benefit.

But aside from these relatively minor complaints, Infected Malignity have crafted a solid, engaging piece of brutal DM with 'The Malignity Born From Despair'. I'm looking forward to a sophomore release with even more quality music.

(Originally written for www.vampire-magazine.com)