Manifesto

I bought this album with the pre-order since I found "Wolves" to be great. I' ve to be honest: after the first listening I was quite disappointed by this one. Not that I din' t enjoy it at all anyway. For example, after the boring intro with the forgettable name ("The Moribund Choir vs The Trumpets of Armageddon" for the record), here it comes "Martyr to science", a song that, if you are into super-catchy choruses sang in limpid female vocals, you would really love. And it' s not just that: you would also love the scratched screams as much as the powerfully growled parts. Same speech for the third track "The Brave / Agony applause": super-catchy.

But. As I said it' s not everything so shiny. If the first song catches your attention after the first listening, I can' t say the same thing for the whole album. Passing over the lyrics, which you can like or dislike, be in agreement or in disagreement (considering they are focused exclusively on the theme of animals and nature respect), what it' s really interesting about this album is how it becomes better and better after every listening. Even though the talent of those guys is clear and shown in each and every one of the tracks, you have to dig to find the essence of this album. Having spoke about the "shiny" parts, it is time to dig.

A question came to my mind when I initially started to get acquainted with this album: did they try to astonish and failed?

After a few listening I found my answer: they tried to astonish and didn' t fail. They took the level they reached with "Wolves" to another level. It seems to me that with the previous album they had an attempt (and a damn good one) in changing their sound. They are definately became more mature. The drums didn't lose anything in quality and the perfect production helps a lot; the bass, well, it is out there doing its job. But the strenght of those guys is not in the drums and, of course, is not in the bass. I think their trademark is, by now, the alternation of the deep growls with the female vocals. As a matter of fact Sabine is not relegated in singing just the chouruses but she usually accompanies the whole song; and, since she is a great singer, the effect is awesome. If you like the recent Soilwork-like developments in melodic death metal, you can' t pass over this album.

As I already said, a few songs in this masterpiece are not easy to get acquainted with. But if it lose from time to time something in the vocal parts, it never does in the musical ones. The riffs get never covered from the vocals or the drums: I must say, they aren' t that original but they have some good peaks. The solos are perfectly mixed: a few shreds, a few very melodic and a trumpet one (which I disliked the first time but that I love now). As they already did on "Wolves" they included some keyboard parts too. At the beginning I was quite disappointed with the variety of the tracks, which gave to the album the form of a collage, but the truth is that this band loves to try new things and, so far, they succeded in almost everything they tried. What I really can' t stand on "Manifesto" is the end of the song "Deathrace": the rapping part is really really useless and becomes boring soon after the first verse. To the contrary, the other guest vocalist, Christian Ãlvestam, the former Scar Symmetry singer, gives to a song already great ("Dying Breed"), a touch of perfection.

This album mixes a lot of different elements and does it extremely well. If you din' t like it after the first listening, I suggest you to give it a second, a third or, if needed, a fourth chance because, when you get used to it, you find an amazing album.

It isn't that I'm against protecting animals and preserving their right to walk the Earth and live in peace. I just hate the obnoxious tendency of groups like PETA to push their beliefs on the general meat-eating populous in such a garish, grotesque and generally grating manner as they tend to. We earned our right at the top of the food chain, and the need to survive eliminates any such bleeding-heart notions like PETA or any other such group pushes forward. Yes, there are things wrong with the way animals are treated, there's no denying that, but the way these groups conduct themselves is no better. Besides being presumptuous, arrogant and douchey, it's really just annoying as Hell. That's what it all boils down to. Those types should be met with a swift middle finger in the air and a "Fuck you, I will eat what I want," no questions asked. Those types certainly have no place in music, much less Heavy Metal...

...which brings us to our latest ghastly aberration, Deadlock, and their new album Manifesto. Yes, it's pompous progressive melodeath with vegetarian lyrics, and it is every bit as disgusting and terrible as you can possibly imagine. Sounding like an amalgamation of Ozzy Osbourne's solo project, with the heavy and distorted guitars, and Pagan's Mind's more electronic, spacey moments and elaborate lead guitar work, Deadlock at least don't sound like anyone else, if that is any consolation. The first song, "Martyr to Science" kicks in after a laughable intro piece that tells us "motherfuckers" to get ready, or something like that, over some pop synthesizers, and it isn't terrible. I mean, that introduction piece had me ready for some grade A bullshit, but the band doesn't start out the album in the worst way possible, not at first. Despite the riffs taking the pinch-harmonic squeal thing a little too far, the song has a nice uptempo beat and some great female vocals by pretty Sabine Weniger, who is by far the best part of this album. So, this one song is alright, a nice opener to get the listeners fired up. It isn't good, but it's certainly not bad, either.

But then the next couple of songs kick in, and they're all pretty much the same. This album only has two modes of emotional discourse: energetic and over the top, and even more energetic and over the top. Everything is always played loud and proud, and while I normally would appreciate such bravado, it's like Deadlock don't have any notions of subtlety. They want to get their shitty message across, so they play everything LOUD AND EXTREME, because that's the only way to express yourself in music apparently. They think their listeners are morons, too dense to "get" their message without obvious, blunt lyrics and modern guitar chugging a la Lamb of God or Biomechanical. No, there is no way to express yourself by using well written songs that aren't just clusters of heavy guitar clunking (in fact, the amount of actual riffs on this album is surprisingly low, looking back) and shredding solos. Of course not. This is sometimes listenable, as on the more melodic "Agony Applause," but most of the time it's just faceless and bland. The songs lose themselves in their suffocating, sterile technicality and become faceless and boring.

Alright, alright, the vegan lyrics are atrocious, but we can at least fool ourselves into thinking the music is okay even though the lyrics amount to little more than a paragraph broken up into stanzas, right? I mean, it certainly isn't the worst thing I've ever heard. It's silly, over-produced and pretentious, but I've heard worse.

Well, I thought so until the album reached the halfway point with "Deathrace," where it just became obvious that the band didn't care about the music at all. The song is a typical blasting, chugging modern Metal extravaganza until around the 4:30 mark, where a rapper comes in and starts rapping: "Animals can't speak but we can," he says first, and then the song just goes to shit right there, as he continues to project his verbal vomit all over this song for the next two minutes until its end, over this hypnotic, repetitive synth melody that reminds me of the music that plays in cartoons when a character gets brainwashed. With the little swirls in their eyes and the drool dripping from their gaping mouths and the whole package, you know the deal.

That, my friends...that was the point of no return. Nothing could have ever redeemed Manifesto after that. The album had dug its own grave and lay right down in it and buried itself alive. No matter how good the songs following it were (they aren't), the album would have still received a zero. There is no going back after something like this monstrosity, this perversion of nature.

There isn't even any clever build-up to it. It's like two completely different songs, divided right down the middle, and this guy is a really terrible rapper, at that, even when you don't take into account what he's rapping about (that is, he's trying to make us feel sorry for the animals, as the rest of the album is). I'm at a loss of words on this one. Is this what all of our musical advances have come to at the end of the day? Six minutes of torture with crappy modernized slush on one end and barely tolerable rapping on the other? It's like being caught in an alley-way between a rapist with Syphillis and a brick wall covered in acid and barbed wire, there's no way to come out wholly intact. What were they thinking? It's like the band just threw their hands in the air, gave up and decided to stop trying to make their music listenable. Besides, throwing in rappers in a Metal album is SO OPEN MINDED, right? Even if it's as sloppily done and poorly written as it is here, right? Now you guys can hide behind the "You're just too close-minded to understand our complex and deep music!" veil, right? Haha...ha...ha...my brain is melting out of my ears right now.

I'm still calling bullshit on that, though. Being open-minded and appreciative of music doesn't entail liking crap like this. Who the fuck listens to music to be preached to like this anyway, huh? That's what I want to know; that's the other thing wrong with this. I cannot think of one plausible and well-reasoned explanation for why anyone would consider this patronizing, egotistic, holier-than-thou trash entertaining or of any value at all. Yes, the message isn't a bad one, but the execution of it is: the band is constantly talking down to you, telling you how you should think, blowing things out of proportion and trying to make you feel all guilty for not being a vegetarian like the pompous assholes that they are. It's very, very poorly done, and even I could make a better set of lyrics, and I don't even follow the message conveyed here.

Deadlock didn't want to write a Metal album with this release. They can pretend they did, but really all they were doing was lording their beliefs over everyone else under the guise of shitty guitars and over-done solo work. The promo sheet I got for this one claims that they were "picking out mankind's gorging and exploitation of animals as a conceptual storyline," but I don't think that's true at all. I think this band should stop making music, throw away all pretenses of intellectualism and go back to picketing fast food restaurants and malls, because that is clearly where they belong. There's no point in talking about any of the rest of the songs after "Deathrace"; why bother? The album died right there. The rest of it is pretty much crap, and that's all there is to it. Watered down, flashy garbage to appeal to people with no attention spans or taste or standards at all. Since I do not ride a short bus or wear a tin foil hat, this music does nothing for me.

It isn't like music with vegan lyrics HAS to suck, either. This could be done well, even on a Metal album, if the bullshit was reigned in and the lyrics and songwriting were better. I could see an album with more poetic and intelligent lyrics (probably conceptual) focusing on saving the animals or vegetarianism being tolerable, with the right minds behind it. Deadlock's Manifesto isn't, though. This is definitely the worst album of the year, and rarely has any music ever made me this angry. Fuck this album. Fuck everything it stands for, and fuck anyone who thinks it's any good. This album is unpleasant by way of both the music, being uninspiring, uncatchy and thoroughly unenjoyable all around, and especially the lyrics, posing itself as this ridiculous sort of sympathetic animal apologist and this "enlightened" all knowing one at the same time. Deadlock are a joke that stopped being funny before it even began, and if you think I won't break that promo CD I got in half and throw it in the trash after this, you are mistaken. Good fucking riddance.

Originally written for http://www.metalcrypt.com

Their previous effort, Wolves, was a good release, but only a few songs really stood out and deserved that replay factor many seek in music. Manifesto is pretty much the same. Just like Wolves, they throw all these filler tracks with a few laudable songs. It's like they woke up one day, wrote a good song, woke up the next day on the wrong side of the bed and wrote another song. Manifesto reeks of inconsistency.

They do, however, ditch the overdone simple song structure and go for a more mathcore song writing approach, but still fuse basic song structure. Unfortunately, a lot of the riffs are forgettable and you're destined to either love the catchy vocals, or hate it. You will find no memorable riffs on this album.

The production is definitely muddier, which I don't see as a bad thing unless you're in to heavy drums like their last effort. The vocals still drown out the guitars. In retrospect, the male vocalist seems to have ditched the heavier growl sounds and went for a mixture of growls/shriek/screams which sound utterly disgusting. Fortunately, Sabine is still as strong as ever and is definitely the highlight of this album.

There are a few guest vocalists on Manifesto, one being a rapper (halfway through "Deathrace" you'll be greeted by rap talking about some PETA bullshit, following the theme of the whole CD) and one being ex-vocalist Christian of Scar Symmetry. Sabine and Christian are ultimate highlight of this album in the song, "Dying Breed" which kicks ass from start to finish, unlike the rest of the album.

In the end, Manifesto isn't much better than Wolves. The inconsistency is still the same, the shitty lyrics got shittier and plague every song, and the riffs are boring. Check this out if you're a die-hard fan of Deadlock, otherwise I recommend looking somewhere else.