Motherwar

Like most who have heard or checked out this album, I got into this because of the sped-up, all guitar cover of The Final Countdown (yes, no keyboarding on this version). After only a few listens through it was very clear their original work was even better. The entire album is a thrashing, heavy, fast-paced amalgamation of death metal, melody and excellent guitar work.

The composition is well-written music with lots of guitar work and some solos throughout the album. There are lengthy instrumental breaks and sections. The namesake outro track is mostly instrumental and quite long, but never boring, and quite full of notes. Also the mood isn't angry and vocal-oriented (I got something to say) but makes you pay more attention to the instrumentation.

Production isn't overly polished. It sounds to me like old-school thrash but slightly more down-tuned. On the other side it's not raw, fuzzy and unclear. It is heavy, distorted and notes and power can be discerned.

The vocals aren't brooding, shrieking, nor any way scream/-core like. Just the mid-range snarling growl you would expect in most bands of true melodic death metal. And unlike many so-called melodic death metal bands of Sweden there are no clean vocals which try to be all emotional and then progress to scream/-core like and/or mid-to-high ranged growl.

I have no real idea what the lyrics are about other than I'd guess the 2nd track is about the mother of all wars and possibly a war to end wars on this world in the future or some other futuristic world. Lyrics aren't that important to me, obviously, as I have been listening to this album for 12 years now.

So, if you love melodic death metal for the same reasons I do (lots of notes, instrumental sections and no clean vocals) I can highly recommend it.

I stole this album off of the internet because it has a cover of “The Final Countdown” on it, and it was easier to find a rar of the whole album than it was just that one song. I'm not going to buy this. Only boredom compelled me to listen to it. If someone catches me listening to it and asks me what it is, I'll lie and say it's Slipknot or something. Dispatched doesn't sound like Slipknot, but I doubt anyone will press the issue and it will spare me some embarrassment.

Micro-review of the Europe cover: sped up and flashier, keyboards are excised, vocal melodies transferred to guitar. Vocals are harsh and high-pitched, production is pristine and has a bit of echo. Entertaining; neither particularly better nor worse than Norther's cover, but more nimble.

Like most ironic melodeath covers of mainstream songs, it turns out to be thoroughly non-ironic. If you'd never heard of the band Europe you'd just assume “The Final Countdown” was the single (and the best song on the album) and you'd think no more of it.

The other songs trade off accessibility for... artistic depth, I guess. Well, the big epic moment is the last track because it's fifteen minutes long. It's a three minute song that just doesn't stop. Or five three-minute songs that have no track pauses between them. I can't complain that it drags because I only noticed that it was any longer than the other songs when I looked at the track counter.

You're already familiar with melodeath: the most mainstream parts of extreme metal combined with the most extreme parts of mainstream metal. It has way more talent than the crap all the other kids at school listen to (who think KoRn are metal, lulz) since it has solos but it totally pwnz all that tr00 crap that only elitists listen to. I've never seen an episode of Metalocalypse, but this is what I figure Dethklok probably sounds like. I think everybody that would have been into this back in 2000 listens to metalcore instead now.

Some think it wrong to criticize a band merely for the genre to which they belong, but melodeath is, by definition, the musical equivalent of what you're left with after chewing a mouthful of Animal Crackers for five minutes straight. Like metalcore, it has no unique musical characteristics and is therefore just a polite way of saying that a band sucks.

A second memorable part of the album – or should I say, the other of the two memorable parts of the album, besides the cover – is when the title track borrows the theme from the first movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 41 in G minor KV 550 for a bridge.

Perhaps you perceive the pattern now. The whole problem with Dispatched is that they try too hard to be original. They're at their worst when they're not copying somebody else's ideas. I could probably get into one of these melodeath acts if they just stuck to doing novelty covers and ripping off classical composers. Oh wait, that's Children of Bodom. They suck. Never mind.

Learn about Animal Crackers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cracker