The Contaminated Void

It is not often one finds a great band by nothing but chance. I remember picking up this album when it was released just because of the bad-ass artwork, I went home, I listened to it and couldn't avoid thinking how lucky I was I got a winner.

The record starts at once with a heavy doze of nothing but full blasting death metal, no wonder why they made a t-shirt later on with that sentence, and from there it won't let it go, which doesn't means there is no variation in here, there are lots of slow riffing (very reminiscent of Suffocation), harmonized guitar solos and some interesting mid tempo songs, listen to that bass in Return to Ashes or the intro riff in Waiting for Buildings to Collapse.

The influences are varied but all extreme nonetheless, if I were to describe this album I would say this is how Decapitated (The Negation-era) would sound like if they wanted to play like Nasum, of course here comes the mandatory mention of drummer maestro Anders Jakobson, pretty much the reason why this band came to be in the first place.

The Contaminated Void in general is as a straight forward record as it could get, don't expect to get clean passages or keyboards to build-up atmosphere, the band relies mostly on its sheer brutality to make its way to the listener and if you come here expecting something else other than growling madness, blast beats and hammering mid-tempo riffs, you might miss the reason why this album is actually good, its raw energy, even the production accentuates the savageness of the music here performed. Don't be fooled though, there is enough technicality and charisma to please any Cannibal Corpse or Suffocation fan.

To finish this review, don't listen to music expecting all the time that next song that will take your mind to higher levels of consciousness or whatever, to listen to an album expecting nothing but a sonic beating might be just as rewarding and it will surely happen more often, in which case I will surely recommend Coldworker's The Contaminated Void because oh boy these guys succeeded at doing exactly that, and the score isn't higher just because the albums that followed this one were even better.

I hate the cold. A couple weeks ago, I was waiting for the bus to take me to my grade ten science exam. But it never came. -28 degree weather isn't fun to stand around in for forty minutes. Trust me on that one. Yet, metal bands like Wintersun, Norther, and Immortal seem to be able to take that frostbitten coldness and make it into an enjoyable slab of, well…cold frostbitten metal. And while I don't really know what the general stance on the cold from death metal bands is, a band going by the name of Coldworker was somewhat intriguing. Formed in 2006 by drummer Anders Jakobson, formally drummer of Grind band Nasum, in Orebro, Sweden, the death metal quintet already has one album to their credit. Released January 23 in the United States, the 39 minute debut titled, The Contaminated Void, is quite an intense production. Yet, disappointingly, it doesn't fare all that well when you look past that aspect.

But we'll get to that later. What The Contaminated Void does well is offer listeners an excessively brutal platter of death metal. Songs like the opener, The Interloper, the album's title track, or A Custom Made Hell all include blindingly heavy guitars, drumming, and pretty much everything. And the guys in Coldworker sound pretty decent, firing monstrous, technical sounding riffs off at top speed. Long time fans of death metal should particularly enjoy this aspect of the band, as it is by for the best done, and it appears as though it is where Coldworker spent most of its time fine tuning. Throughout The Contaminated Void, emphasis is put on creating a destructive, chaotic barrage of riffing and blast beats, and the band succeeds at creating such an atmosphere in pretty much every song, with The Interloper, in my opinion, being the highlight.

So what is so bad about The Contaminated Void that drags it down to levels of mediocrity? Simple. The lack of variation shown throughout the album is shocking. Every song, from The Interloper to Generations Decay, sounds exactly the same. If you thought DragonForce or Hammerfall were far too samey and predictable, then I would not recommend checking out this record, because quite frankly, they make the likes DragonForce sound experimental and original. And while lack of variety is never a good thing, the problem worsens do to the lack of interestingness that the album offers. As the album's closing songs roll around, listeners will breath collective sighs of relief, as The Contaminated Void becomes a rather annoying chore to listen to all the way though. While the riffs might have been entertaining in The Interloper, An Unforgiving Season, or D.E.A.D., the oft recycled guitar lines simply cannot maintain the momentum for 39 minutes.

While the musicianship found in Coldworker's debut album is somewhat impressive, the album does not really merit more than a few listens. While some death-heads should enjoy the brutal direction the band takes, the album's tediousness renders it practically unlistenable. The only song you really need to hear from the album is The Interloper, as all thirteen other tracks sound exactly the same. There is definitely better death metal out there, and I expect The Contaminated Void to be one of the year's weaker releases. Unless you're a fan of brutal (both in the positive and negative sense) metal, there isn't really anything interesting here, move along folks.

(Originally written for Sputnikmusic)