Suffering upon the Throne of Depravity

Daggerspawn are a Serbian band ripping out some old-school death metal. They have been knocking around for a few years now, churning out the sort of singles, demos and splits you'd expect from a young band, and here we finally get their debut album. It's a pretty short album at only about 35 minutes of real meat, plus three live cuts to pad it out, but in the realms of death metal that is fairly standard.

This band is not breaking any molds, as their sound is pretty much a hybridization of the speed of old Morbid Angel and the sludgy melody of classic Bolt Thrower. Sure, it's not original, but I like it. Daggerspawn go after it with a lot of energy, wringing out twisted, evil riffs leavened with melodic hooks and chaotic leadwork. They are not techy or precise, going after a feral assault more than the clickety sterility of some ‘broootal' bands. Speaking of clickety, there is not any of that here, as the production is actually pretty damned good. They have a nice fat guitar sound and drums that sound like drums, and while you can hear everything, it's still dirty enough to be cool.

There is some wastage here, as the first and fourth tracks are both atmospheric interludes without much point. But with slabs of death metal killing like "Children Of The Livid Sea" and "I Am The Thousand Plagues" I am prepared to forgive quite a bit of that. Daggerspawn are just getting started, and a debut album this enjoyable says good things about their future potential. This is an underground gem for all death metal fans to check out, as this is a band worth watching for.

Originally written for www.metalcrypt.com

Here we have a boring and cliche Death Metal album that evokes a giant "who gives a shit?" from anyone looking for, you know, talent or passion in their music. Daggerspawn are a new band, and that's really all you can say about them - aside from how bland and tepid this stuff is. The guitars are heavy and downtuned to the point where they don't really pack any punch at all, the solos are...solos and the vocals are...vocals. And that's the best way to describe any of that. A lot of this is just really hideously poorly executed, with no hooks or anything to really keep you interested after even a few seconds. The songwriting is really disgusting, too, with no coherent flow or structure in most of the songs aside from a lot of pukeish, vaguely unpleasant heavy bullshit coming from the guitars. Sections are thrown in at random, but not too often, because that would just be crazy (?). This is the kind of thing that people who aren't into Death Metal think every band sounds like, except the difference is that this actually does sound like that - chugging guitars, growling vocals, a lack of melody in a lot of places, et cetera. It's the most soulless, vapid music you can possibly imagine. There is nothing here you haven't heard done better anywhere else.

It's really kind of hard to even describe music like this. What is there to say? There's so little about this that you will remember after the album stops playing, so little that even merits a response at all, but fuck it, I might as well try: Of particular annoyance is the awful intro piece, which is literally just a minute and a half of the same plodding, machinated plinking looped over and over again, and then the song "In the Bane and Enlightenment of Man," which drops out the monotonous Death Metal-lite chugging about halfway through for some lady to narrate over a fluttery background melody - it's like that Deadlock song I talked about in my review for that album a few months ago, except I actually think this is worse. It has no clever build-up, no entertainment value, and it's placed at the second-to-last spot on the track list, making it pretty fucking pointless if you're just going to start pretending you never did that non-sequitur crap in the first place! Oh yeah, and don't you just love how they put live bonus tracks on the end? Yeah, that's exactly what I want to hear after a half hour of this garbage, more of the same thing played live. The arrogance here is astounding; I've never understood why new bands would think their live material is so desirable when they haven't even made a name for themselves yet.

This is an awful album. Everything about it sucks, from the sterility of the songwriting to the faceless nature of the songs themselves, to the absolutely appalling set of bad ideas the band has collected here like stamps. There is nothing on this album that I could even fathom normal human beings finding enjoyable, and if you don't listen to this, you are wiser than I was.

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