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Spinal Cord > Remedy > Reviews
Spinal Cord - Remedy

great more boring crash shit - 40%

Noktorn, May 19th, 2011

Another day, another thankless Crash release- although, to be fair, this has a better pedigree than most, featuring Polish bass-for-hire Novy, who's also done time with Vader and Behemoth in the past. Still, we all know that the bass is usually unplugged when recording a metal album, so who really cares. Spinal Cord is a Polish death metal band that really wants to be a rock band, and for the most part makes extremely boring music that fits magnificently on Crash's boring catalog of releases.

Spinal Cord uses a lot of dissonant riffs which sound like the first Fear Factory album, as well as a lot of double bass and growled vocals, but for the most part this really sounds like rock music. There tends to only be a handful of riffs in each song, and it's pretty clear when riffs are being used to establish something similar to a verse-chorus structure. This isn't necessarily problematic, but the issue is that the riffs are just so weird- there's a lot of conventional, boring death metal riffs that sound like the simplest and lamest of the Cannibal Corpse catalog, but then there's a lot of bleating, dissonant high chords that sound like they'd belong more on a post-hardcore record than a death metal one. This would make this album kind of interesting, but it really doesn't, because despite the periodic weirdness of the riffs, the songs are still pretty much rock songs in death metal drag.

One of Spinal Cord's biggest problems is predictability and repetition. A lot of time you'll heard the band bust out a weird, off-time fill- just to repeat it again immediately, robbing the song of all its momentum and element of surprise. Spinal Cord will at no point on this album do something that tricks or shocks you- they play exclusively by numbers all the way through, even if the numbers are sometimes fractions. An even bigger problem is the sheer repetition of certain elements. Spinal Cord likes to use weird, erratic rhythms, but they use and reuse these rhythmic motifs until what would have been cool one time becomes grating and obnoxious because a particular riff or rhythm just can't stand the weight of so much repetition. Never has so little been done with so much.

I will give Spinal Cord credit for one thing: they actually don't sound like Polish death metal. But that's just because they don't sound like much at all- they're a weird combination of death metal, avant-garde oddities, and rock music, but they forgot all the songwriting along the way. This music has no flow, no direction, and no memorability- just skip it and move on to the next (invariably just as uninteresting) release from Crash you can find.

Heading in the right direction. - 72%

Harachte, November 2nd, 2004

Spinal Cord opts for the more melodic approach to death metal. This Polish band puts out their debut “Remedy” on which there’s a cornucopia of solos and leads, melody galore so to speak. Also present is a clean level of production which results in a very transparent overall sound.

Spinal Cord has an advantage above some other bands in the genre because the band features vocalist Barney (what’s in a name?) whose capability to do some clean vocals besides the standardized grunts (“Remedy”, for example) make the band sound more interesting, but comparisons between Spinal Cord and other bands in the genre are yet difficult to make.

The tracks on “Remedy” are well constructed and one can safely speak of well-performing musicians, although I do miss some really explosive material, just as it's the case with their Polish fellow countrymen of Esqarial.

But there’s plenty of time to improve because the band is existing for a mere five years now, and one could say Spinal Cord is heading in the right direction already…