Review: 5 Billion Dead “s/t” CD

Ehhh, no thanks. This looked like it was gonna be a mediocre death metal EP, but instead it's a slightly less than mediocre nu-metal EP. Ultra detuned basic rhythmic grooves, monotone singing vocals, weird guitar effects, simplistic song structures that stick to three or four minutes of fairly straightforward and repetitive riffing, etc. They layer in some deeper vocals that are almost growled, and when they speed things up a little it can start to sound more like "real metal", but... calling it what it is, this is basically nu-metal. It's not really melodic, and they're not really going for the catchy route it seems, but it's still not something I can really get into. Some of the drumming's alright and I like the thickness of the bassist's playing style, but the songwriting's not my thing. There are too many unnecessary pinch harmonics, it's too groovy, there aren't many powerful rhythms at all, and the vocals really get on my nerves quickly. "Buried in Sand" is a pretty terrible song through and through, "Hate the World" has some decent dissonant chords and slower chord progressions but dies out as soon as the Godsmack sounding clean guitars and singing vocals come in, and "Reality Filter" has the best riffs on the entire EP with some midpaced bruisers and subtle hints at near melody, but it's still not a good song because the vocals and meandering dynamics kill the momentum. The production is pretty good, I'll give 'em that. I think the drums need a little more punch to balance out with the heaviness of the guitars and bass, and they could probably get the bass to go a little louder, but other than that everything sounds fine. I'm not into the vocal styles but that's all about the delivery, the actual sound quality's about right. The kick drums are the weakest link in the recording because they kind of cut through against the more defined edge of the basslines. The disc comes in a digipack, but I'm honestly not into the layout at all. The typeface is a little cheesy, the rough sketches of skeletal figures aren't really working for me, etc. It could be worse, the print quality and whatnot is at least good and shows some effort put into it, but the visual appeal is still lacking. There are supposed to be some live videos on the CD-Rom portion but I tried it on two computers and it screwed up on both of 'em, so fuck it. This isn't really doing anything for me. There's a minimal degree of value here and I can tell they're making an attempt to try and do something that has a certain level of production quality, but when the music's just not there, what can you do?