Warspite "Gallery of the Macabre - Studies of Death and Darkness" CD
[Crimes Against Humanity]
Step #1: Skip the first track, it's just a stupid synth intro that sounds cheesy as hell and serves no purpose. Step #2: Pay no attention to the fact that the drum blast introducing the first real song sounds about as powerful as a wet piece of toilet paper because the drum tones are triggered as hell. After that, you're good to go, because this thing kicks out over 30 minutes of blazing death metal that sounds better to me than about 95% of the death metal I've heard in the last eight years or so. I'm talking brutal, early-90's styled death metal with low vocal growls, great riffing that combines the finest elements of death metal with a little bit of a modern technical flare, plenty of tempo variation, and so on. Original? No, not particularly. But it's great for what it is, and it's rare for a contemporary death metal record to hit me like this one has. There's a slight, slight hint of melody on rare occasion, but nothing uncalled for. These Germans can write some songs. I don't find myself getting bored by this at all, not only because the songs rarely stretch very far past four minutes (if that), but because they've got a good sense of transitioning pieces together and keeping the momentum going. The production is pretty damn good. As mentioned the drums lack density and sound overly rigid and taut, but the rest of the instruments keep that problem in check pretty well, as do the vocals - providing more than enough low-end to help things out. The guitars are heavy and fairly well controlled with a nice, thick level of distortion, the bass is fairly defined when it shows itself, etc. Aside from fixing the drums, I'd jack up the bass (which may require lessening some of the low-end on the guitars and vocals) and that's about it. No big deal. About half of the tracks were recorded a couple of years ago (three of which appeared on the band's split 7" with Groinchurn) and have a slightly different sound with barely thicker drums, a bit more bass, and a tad more muddiness to the mix. But the two sessions sound very similar to one another, and the continuity of the disc isn't disrupted one bit. The only thing about this that blows is the layout. The front cover image is actually awesome, I love that, but everything else is crap. All of the font choices are poor and the text is hard as hell to read, the booklet is chock full of goofy band photos, huge thanks lists, and other extraneous crap, leaving out the lyrics (which could have been interesting), etc. It looks sloppy and haphazard. They do include the lyrics for one song, but it's the only song on the record that's in German, so I have no idea what the content is, nor why they decided against printing lyrics for the other songs. But whatever. I can't believe this is coming from Crimes Against Humanity! I have no qualms about the label branching out, trust me, because this record rips, but damn was I shocked when I threw it in for the first time. Good stuff. Fans of no frills, down to business death metal need give this a listen. (7/10)
Running time - 36:21, Tracks: 12
[Notable tracks: Eternal Hate, Mulirium Poena, I See Your Guts, Your Life]
Crimes Against Humanity - http://www.cahrecords.com

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