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Unseen Terror > Human Error > Reviews
Unseen Terror - Human Error

Another Gem for the Extreme Movement of the 80s - 88%

CHRISTI_NS_ANITY8, July 10th, 2008

There is a thread here on Metal Archives about the naissance of the blast beats technique and there are a lot of comments about the early grincore and hardcore/punk movements that surely contributed in creating this bestial form of tempo, which nowadays seems to be abused with so many bands. All this speech is just to introduce you one of the bands that utilized this technique at the beginning, when all seemed so pure and sincere.

The year 1987 was revolutionary for the extreme scene with bands like Napalm Death, Sarcofago and others and these Unseen Terror are a part of that scene. A scene that was changing the way of playing metal. The story is quite simple: two guys, heavily influenced by thrash metal and hardcore, decided to form a band that could include inside all the elements of the two genres and somehow they invented a genre or, better, helped it to become revolutionary. The principal influences were Repulsion, Slayer and Insanity.

These two guys were Mitch Dickinson and Shane Embury, yes the famous bass player of Napalm Death, Lock Up and so on. Unfortunately the unluckiness was a constant shadow for this band, that never had a constant bass player. When the Earache offered them to record an album, the problem was easily solved: Mitch played all the instruments and Shane was behind the drums. To sum up all their sound and influences, we can say that here we find a perfect blend of hardcore and hyper fast, but never chaotic, grind.

This little, historical piece of metal was recorded only on vinyl but in 2001, after 14 years, Earache decided to put it on CD format, for the happiness of the collectors. Talking about the various tracks, here we can find the classic hyper devastating detonations that last for few seconds like “Nermal” and “Odie’s Revenge” and better structured pieces of burning death/thrash like the “Unseen Terror” track and “Death Sentence”. The production is extremely clear for the instruments and far better than the one in albums by early Napalm Death or Defecation.

What really astonishes the listener is the guitars distortion. They have a fuzz distortion with lot of treble inside and influences that go from Hellhammer to thrash metal and the before cited Repulsion. Also the Shane’s way of playing the drums is incredible. The blast beats are quite precise and they are mostly early hardcore inspired for the fast alternation of the beats between the snare and the bass drum. The drums sound is woody, clear cut and really pounding. The level of violence is always high but sometimes these musicians can be also very funny, thanks to songs dedicated to Garfield, the funny cat.

The other tracks are mostly about the social and politics problems. A peculiarity of the early grindcore bands. The simple up tempo by the drums are made to mosh against the stage for the Helhammerish alternation of the snare-bass beats. The vocals are incredibly personal for the genre because they are not on annoying screams, but they always keep a low and quite rough tonality that is very inspired by Tom G. Warrior but lower here. The songs run after each other in fast succession without leaving us a second to relax.

It’s useless to say how much an album like this could beat easily “Scum” or “Purity Dilution” and you can hear it by yourselves by buying it. Surely worth more than just a simple, fast listen. It’s a small piece of history and deserves your attention.

Garfield loves lasanga... and Unseen Terror. - 76%

Funeral_Shadow, December 16th, 2006

These were the grand old days when grindcore was still unlabeled and still unperfected. At this time, this style of music Unseen Terror play was called "extreme metal", which many saw as a blend of metal (thrash) and some hardcore influences. Nowadays, this music on the album "Human Error" is known as grindcore, but in Unseen Terror's case, they blended loads of technical thrash guitar riffs.

What we have here are two lads at the time who recorded this album because they've been offered a record deal from Earache records. They didn't have a bass player and couldn't find a stable one to stick with, so the members (which consisted of Shane Embury of later Napalm Death fame and Mitch Dickenson of Heresy fame) recorded the album all on their own with Shane handling drums and Mitch carrying guitar, bass and vocal duties.

There are some interesting aspects of this recording, and some which are quite... well, lame. Firstly, many people know Shane for being a big man playing bass. Prior to him playing bass, he played drums as mentioned before. His drumming skill is not what we may call technical nowadays but for it's time, the drumming was pretty technical. His drumming style consisted of mostly blast beats and "chugga chugga" style drum beats that's very common in thrash metal. It's very fast paced and usually is relentless; there’s no resting or slow moment with his drumming style. Did I mention that his drumming is dead on and almost sounds too programmed on a drum machine? Not bad for a person who plays bass nowadays.

Secondly, the production reeks of treble noise; it's flat sounding, giving it that "old school" feel to it. This is not being regarded as bad production at all. The album has a crisp sound to it, there is no fuzz to be found or white noise in the background like found on other early incantations of grindcore music (think Napalm Death's "Scum" or Repulsion's "Horrified.") It still maintains a raw aspect to the production, where the vocals sound like they're done in a spacious booth, and the drums sound very dense (they sound like plastic cans being pounded away!) There is no echo to the drumming or drive to the guitar tone. The music ironically has this clean and nice old school feel to it.

The best way to sum up the sound of this album is saying it's what Heresy would sound if they would have played with more metal balls attached to their gonads. This is Heresy's metal brother, harmonizing the speed and hardcore grunt style of Heresy with touches of Repulsion-meets-Nuclear Assault rawness. The music is predominantly multiple schizo-thrash riffs played over blast beats and grunts uttered over the technicality. The riffs really are impressive sounding, coming from a person who played in a hardcore band like Heresy and accordingly not being at the ranks of riff masters like US thrash metal band Dark Angel. You can count usually a total of a good 7-13 riffs found in each song; not bad at all considering how short most of these songs are.

My only real complaint with the release is the grunt style vocals. I actually love the hardcore style grunt vocals, especially when they're in metal bands like this one, but the vocals lack pitch. They're pretty monotonous; it sounds like Mitch stood in the vocal booth trying to kept up with the speed of the music with his grunts more than actually singing to the music. They have no range or pitch and are consistent. After a while, the music is enjoyable but the vocals ruin the fast, mosh-ful atmosphere of the music with the spoken-style vocals.

Also, the music sounds pretty "flat" because you could hardly hear a bass. This isn't that big of a flaw because the flat, dull sound on the album adds to the "old schoolness" of the album sound as I mentioned before. Though I have to admit that some songs overused the blast beat style drumming and sometimes can be one dimensional. You can tell when Shane will blast beat, then go into a timpani drum role and then the "chugga chugga" style drumming. Then again, I'm not too sure if drums are Shane's tools of the trade (bass seems to be his instrument if you ask me) so I'm not going to be too anal about his drumming style because it's still enjoyable.

For a recording done by two guys in a few days, this is definitely not bad at all. It's technical in it's own sense but don't be too misled by this label today because there are far more technical bands than this of course. Just keep in mind that if you're going to listen to "Human Error", it's presenting what was once known as technical style metal and not what it's known for today. Now go and thrash your brains out to this stuff.

Oh and Garfield for President! Yay!


Ear Candy: Unseen Terror, Ignorant Scene, Garfield for President, Winds Of Pestilence, In A Shallow Grave...