Gross Negligence

This is a great CD. You won’t get seizures from the speed and you will not suffer ocular bleed as a result of the heaviness, but it’s just so damn good regardless. Most of the songs are really memorable; though a few are pretty pointless clocking in at under a minute and usually have one mediocre riff to it and nothing more. They are not all a total waste of time, The Whales!? Is kind of fun but for the most part I could do without these filler tracks.

The normal songs with actual writing involved are great. False Pretenses is an incredible song, so is Europhobia, Juggernaut, I Am the Terrorist. Almost every real track here has something interesting going on. Most songs have quick little sound clip intro that I like. They are usually related to the songs and do add something to it, hell I Am The Terrorist has an intro from the Hezbollah website! The guest musicians are also good, it’s nice to hear some flute thrown into death/grind. Personally I would have thought it an idiotic idea, but it works great. Some acoustic introductions as well that sounds great. Another thing I like is that the song Juggernaut isn’t really death/grind at all, its basically doom metal. Though its listed at the end of the CD it is actually second to last song so towards the end of this moderate tempo intellectual grind fest you get this slow doom song for almost seven minutes followed by a quick little grind song. It’s a great effect.

This does however bring up a criticism I have. My CD is messed up and the track list on the back isn’t the same as it is on the CD. On the CD it says: Europhobia, The DJ is Dead, Juggernaut in the order. Actually order: The DJ is Dead, Juggernaut, Europhobia. Not a big deal I like the track order this way but it confused the hell out of me for a while, since the DJ is Dead had 8 lines of lyrics and was seven minutes long and Europhobia fit half a page on lyrics into several seconds…whatever.

The production on this CD is great. It’s pretty dirty and defiantly dark as hell, but you can hear every instrument and nothing dominates, and the dirty production seems to give it a character that I would miss if it were any cleaner. The production is perfect for how this CD should sound. The lyrics on this release are awesome, its sweet low growls with occasional screams. Their vocalist is great, and good lyrics to boot, not like you can understand any of them but good lyrics do help the attitude behind the music. The guitar riffs are good, very memorable, very harsh, and very aggressive. It’s not extremely fast but there are plenty of supersonic grind bands around so a slower grind band is welcome as far as I care. Not much to say about drums other then I like the way they sound.

Another nice aspect of this CD is the booklet, its really weird; you’ll have to buy it to find out how. As for the artwork, just pictures off the Internet, it certainly fits but it won’t blow you away.

Over all: a great CD that I find myself listening to almost everday.