Papercut Homicide "From Filth Comes Grace" CD
[Retribute]
Hmmm... this band features former members of Red Sky and current members of Nemo, and while this material does show potential, it's not really doing that much for me in all truthfulness. They blow through 16 tracks of blazingly fast and chaotic death/grind with some hardcore influences as well (mainly in the shouted vocals and some of the slower breaks) in just about 33 minutes, but it feels like they're being fast and fairly technical just for the sake of it. The songs aren't really very memorable at all, which is especially problematic when your average tracks runs about two minutes or so. The jazzy breaks are fucking awesome though, I'd love to hear some more of that stuff. Lush clean guitars, insane drum fills, thick and serpentine basslines... that's what I'm talking about. I'd take that stuff over a mishmash of blastbeats and complex guitar runs any day of the week. Basically for the duration of this disc I find myself thinking, "Okay, when are they going to slow down or break off another jazzy break?" And that's not how it should be. There should be more cohesion to the writing, because these guys are obviously very talented players. I'd suggest killing the sparse uses of singing vocals, though. They're way too strained and don't offer the welcome relief that they would provide was the vocalist actually capable of holding a good note (the singing vocals kill the otherwise awesome "A Will to Arson"). The production is also an enormous hindrance. Everything sounds thin and distant, so there's no real punch at all. The drums are really clear but they're overly clicky and rigid, and the guitars are sort of rugged and dry, not to mention far off behind the vocals. The mix needs to be a lot cleaner for them to pull off music that's this busy. I like the pop of the snare drum and the tone of the bass guitar, but everything else needs some serious reworking. The layout's not bad. Everything is printed on matte paper and I like the textures and collaged imagery with some overlapping handwritten text on the cover, but the whole torn/burned edges thing can get old after awhile, and does so inside the booklet as all of the lyrics appear on torn and/or burned sheets of paper. It looks okay, they're just not quite pulling it off. That effect just works much better on the photographic collages because it's less noticeable and helps keep the images from feeling so separated. The lyrics consist mostly of brief passages made up of even briefer lines, some more successful than others, that deal with personal issues. "This cripple's crutch. Beautiful idolatry. My sacred calf. Stand me up. So sacrificial. These legs will buckle. Solitary and constant. This is that peace. Shrouded and bound. This is that peace. We've never found. A whisper persists..." I don't know, this just isn't my thing. It's really hard for a band to do this kind of thing properly. I think these guys could do it because they're tight and they have some original ideas, but this isn't a very impressive or original piece of work. It sounds fairly derivative for the most part, and nothing really stands out enough to keep my interest. (5/10)
Running time - 33:34, Tracks: 16
[Notable tracks: Hellfire Choir, Sign of the Helper, The Thread]
Retribute Records - http://www.retributerecords.com

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