The Feelings

Out of sheer coincidence lately I've been listening to a lot of albums like this: kind of line-straddling death/grind/hardcore(?) records that seem to have been nominally popular to make at the beginning of the millennium but quickly lost traction when everyone realized no one was buying them. Obliterate is the Slovakian edition of this weird style for which an audience can't be found. It is, quite naturally, just as weird and offputting as you would expect it to be given the style at work: blasting, technical death/grind sections pushed up against a suffocating wall of midpaced, substantially hardcore influenced passages. That being said, it's not an altogether displeasing listen, and frankly Obliterate does it a lot better than many others do. That also being said it's hardly essential.

The way this sounds is basically as if Napalm Death circa-'Fear, Emptiness, Despair' had continued on that note instead of promptly jettisoning it but reconvened with their 'Utopia Banished'-style roots. 'The Feelings' has a lot of those keening, glassy riffs that defined Napalm Death's mid-era but with a lot of the hardcore and crust edge of the band's earlier work, albeit in a more modern form. There's a weird display of technicality at work, mostly owing to the erratic drum performance and the guitarists' desperate attempts to find the beat in many of the more formless sections of the music ('Boundless Violence' in particular is a hilariously jangly, awkward song in this regard). The less technical (but no less erratic) hardcore edge is really the defining element of the music, less beatdown brocore and more oldschool, propulsive hardcore punk with a violent crust edge. Most of the riffs aren't really recognizably 'death metal' in inspiration- they're a lot closer to Extreme Noise Terror than Deicide most of the time.

The music on 'The Feelings' is very disorganized- not really incoherent, but erratic and wandering. Every track seems packed with more fills and transitions than actual straightforward passages, which makes the vocals sort of an afterthought that I barely notice when listening. There's hints of experimentation here and there, which is really par for the course for any eastern European death/grind band, but executed surprisingly well: the sporadic clean vocals (most notably used on the wonderfully propagandistically titled 'Indian Holocaust'- dear god, did I pick up an Agathocles record by accident?) and occasional moments of textured, amorphous, Meshuggah-goes-ambient riffing are isolated but delivered too straight-faced and competently to be a joke. There's a lot of interesting aspects to this album- sort of a shame they couldn't have made the core songwriting a bit stronger to help even things out. While the individual elements are neat, the band has trouble making memorable riffs and passages that don't just seem like a flurry of notes most of the time.

This is something to look into for those hard-nosed types who are into the confusing styles of extreme metal circa '96-'01, but probably not worth much to anyone else. It's good for an occasional listen and does manage to be surprisingly memorable (as a package, if not song-to-song), but overall I'd leave this to the death metal hardliners among us.