Metalcore from Germany that's far more metal than hardcore, but despite my usual penchant for this style, I'm not into this disc at all. They do have some brutal breakdowns or occasional midpaced thrashy picking patterns that are all great, but the bulk of the disc is mediocre tremolo picking junk with scathing vocals. The vocal style is vicious, and I enjoy that, but the vocal patterns are too jumbled and out of time with the music at times, so that falls flat for me as well. The recording is all messed up, too. It's really thin and there's no crunch at all. The guitars are brittle and wispy, the bass is practically inaudible, the drums are clicky, and the vocals fall right in the midst of it all, so nothing has a real grip to it. All of that adds up and creates numerous problems for me. And none of the songs really stand out to me either. They throw in a few other influences from traditional metalcore or loose melodic Swedish runs, plus some dissonant rhythms and even sparse hints at black metal-esque speeds, but the songs feel disjointed to me. "Weltschmerz" is the most consistently midpaced and chunky, so it flows much better than the others, but "Wie Tag und Nacht" comes off as very generic with lots of senseless speed, "Ersticken" can get slower and more creative in a few of its chords but the riffs simply aren't good, etc. Closer "Einen Schritt Weiter" opens slower and immeasurably more forcefully with some hammer-on/pull-off riffs over thick backing chords, but then like everything else it falls back on boring speeds where the drumming and vocals get sloppy with their timing, so these guys just aren't focusing on their strengths at all. The layout's nice and simple with stark images of a dead crow with spattered blood and feathers over a plain white back ground. The lyrics are all in German with brief song explanations provided in English, so the songs deal with complacency, abuse of the environment , the whole "stabbed in the back" thing, and taking control of your life and living in the present. I'm just not into this from a musical standpoint, though. If the recording wasn't so gratingly thin and annoying they might have something more to offer, but I'm just not enjoying this. I can tell that they're going for a really explosive, furious sense of energy, but it's not coming across with much strength in these compositions. Sorry.
[Mono Man]
Running time - 16:56, Tracks: 5
[Notable tracks: Weltschmerz]
Mondo Man Records - http://www.mondomanrecords.com
