Review: Phazm “Hate at First Seed” CD

This French act features members of Scarve and plays a somewhat disjointed style of metal that shifts from rather effective blackened death metal with moderate doses of melody and technicality to sludgy death 'n' roll complete with bluesy lead breaks and midpaced chunkiness. The lyrics deal with violence and darkness and blah, blah, blah... but they don't really do much for me at all - and that's partly because they tie into the whole idea trees attacking people depicted on the cover, which is quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas for a metal record I've ever encountered. Come to think of it, the band name is really lame too... so it's a shame they've wasted some of their talents on solid riffs for this thing, as I just can't take it very seriously in its entirety. You can't really understand the vocals anyway, but come on... what a silly concept. Hell, it doesn't really matter anyway because I don't like the mix of styles here. They're pretty good at both approaches, but it needs to be either one or the other or more of a consistent middleground, as the writing on this thing just kind of jumps back and forth without much of a linear focus. And the only thing that makes it lean towards being "original" is that it does combine those two styles, otherwise it's just thick death metal with the occasional speed and dissonance of Norwegian black metal. "A Wonderful Death" (the worst song herein) is one of the only tracks that blatantly references the rocked out influences anyway - sans the cover of Mot?rhead's "Dogs", of course. Most of the vocals are snarled screams, but the "death 'n' roll" vocals aren't cutting it, as that gruff singing sort of thing just feels really forced here. I also think the songs tend to be too long, routinely hitting six minutes or more rather than unloading their best moments and moving on. "Vicious Seed" has a midpaced thrashiness to it that stands out well and keeps the energy and hints of melody pretty consistent throughout its four minutes; while "Loneliness" is slower and more creative with its dissonant rhythms and winding riffs - but unlike the other tracks of its nature it comes in at four minutes rather than six, so it feels more complete and to the point (despite not being as well written as some of the other tunes - "Fleshback" is effective in its pounding monotony and quality of riffs, not to mention the killer lead passage). I do think they've got a solid recording, I'll give it that as well as enjoying some of the riffs. The guitars are really fuckin' heavy but maintain a good level of clarity, the lightly distorted bass is ultra thick and helps add a lot of density, the drums are controlled and fall in against the guitars, etc. If the vocals were lowered just a touch the details of the guitars and bass would have a little more room to shine, but it's no big deal. For the most part the production is quite nice. The rest of the layout? I've got mixed feelings there. The lettering sucks as some of it's hard to read or looks like fake handwriting, and overall things are kind of cramped and jumbled. The artwork, however, while sort of cheesy because of the theme, does look pretty good in a pseudo Ed Repka kind of style or something. I don't know, there's enough good material here to get them by and make for a tolerable listen, but they need a lot more direction and cohesion to pull this off effectively. They could easily do it from a musicianship standpoint, it's just a matter of growing as songwriters. Oh, and next time? Leave the goofy concepts behind. There's nothing worse than a decent record with stupid lyrical content.