Passage

After the brilliant debut Viogression strikes back with an album which, well, isn’t that good. No changes have occurred in the music since the debut, we’re still talking Obituary style death metal with doom parts plus some blast beats here’n’there. The problem is that “Passage” is quite boring music wise. Hardly any of the tracks stand out, most of them just kind of float by, in one ear and out the other.

Vocalist Brian DeNeffe growls like he did on the debut (i.e. competently) but is unable to lift the songs off the ground and make them anything special. Many of the songs seem like they’ve just been thrown together from whatever riffs the band managed to come up with. The doom parts that were so heavy and devastating on the debut, lack power and sound dull on “Passage”. Many of the blast parts, which added unsuspected extremity to the debut’s material, sound odd and out of place here. No matter how much I try, I just can’t work up any great enthusiasm for the majority of the songs here and believe me, after being blown away by “Expound & Exhort”, I really wanted to like “Passage”. There are many moments on this record where I feel that the band are trying to be “fucking brutal” but end up being fucking boring instead. This saddens me but I have to be honest, for the most part the magic is gone.

Yet it’s not only the songs that are a let-down. Another big disappointment on “Passage” is the production. On their debut Viogression managed to get a heavy production but here the sound is too thin and this contributes considerably to the material’s overall lack of punch. On the first track the volume levels fade in and out, it sounds like somebody’s playing around at the mixing desk. The first couple of tracks also suffer from another oddity; at times the volume is a lot louder in one channel than in the other. The aforementioned things must be some kind of studio mistakes but it seems like nobody noticed them (or at least didn’t bother to correct them). The drums are triggered and sound quite awful, especially the snare. This is always a negative factor in my eyes. Another thing I noticed is that the mixing is different on different tracks. For example, the drums are higher in the mix on some tracks than on others and the same goes for the guitars.

However, after all this ranting I have to say that “Passage” isn’t all crap. There are some pretty good songs here like e.g. “Lost Forest”, “Michelle Remembers”, “Vampire” and “Diseased” but on an album spanning 13 tracks and with a playing time of almost one hour, that’s just too little. A factor completely inexcusable to me are the mixing blunders on the first couple of tracks (i.e. the varying volume levels). It's truly difficult to listen to these particular tracks when the volume levels keep going back and forth like they do. If anything, "Passage" would need a re-release with a proper re-mix of the whole album to correct the volume level fuckups. Then again, this isn't likely to happen since this is hardly a very sought after release. Fans of early 90s death metal may want to check "Passage" out but I say: forget about this one and get “Expound & Exhort” instead.

Update: I received an e-mail from Brian DeNeffe himself, explaining the production issue. The album was never completed, it's in fact unmixed overall. There are some scratch guitar tracks, while some other tracks and sections are missing. The album should never have been released like this but it was and it's been a thorn in the band members' sides for years.