Review: Soul Less Divine “Dishonourable Suffering” CD

In typical fashion this Canadian band wastes a minute or so with crappy synths before finally kicking into their generic and poorly executed death metal. I can't say this would be horrible if the recording and performances were more in order (there's more a problem with the former than the latter), but it's not great either way, and the sound quality is awful. The entire disc was recorded to a digital 4-track in two days, so that tells you something right there. The low vocal growls are way too far up front and dominate the mix, followed by echoed sounding guitars that have a colder and distant sort of black metal thing happening (which works during some of the more dissonant tremolo picking runs but blows for the chunkier death metal riffing), the bass tends to vanish, and the drums sound unnaturally clicky and taut - highlighting a good number of falters in the drummer's timing. The entire effort sounds more like a demo than a full-length CD, so while I admire the fact that they had this thing professionally pressed, the quality of the music suffers enough to where they should've saved their money until the time was right. The songwriting itself? A mix of death metal styles from the classic era to a more modern and groovy sort of sensibility, littered with occasional black metal-esque influences and a general sense of disarray as far as dropping riff after riff with no real sense of fluidity or coherent song structure. Blastbeats? Check. Brutal growls and a few higher sneers? Of course. Lots of tremolo picking and chunkier chords? Bet on it. A few quick bass breaks? Got 'em. But none of the songs are memorable in the least, so it makes for a really boring and redundant listening experience. The layout? I'm torn. The back cover and most of the booklet pages look good: Nothing but tinted green trees and a sort of sinister appearance. The band photo and the typefaces aren't bad either. But the cover is ruined by this weird figure that's sort of beating its chest with one boxing glove on or some weird shit that looks terrible, and there's some horribly pixilated junk with the band logo going on within one of the spreads as well. Toss that shit and turn the back cover into the front cover and you'd have been good to go. Oh well. Lyrically things can get sort of lame, as borderline hilarious "metal" song titles like "Bestial Warlord of the Sadistic Solstice" would suggest. There are definitely some forced uses of "big words" and overly exaggerated anti-christian sorts of attacks and all that: "Let the darkness of the master enshroud your fucking corpse..." No thanks. I'll pass on this one. On rare occasion they'll hint at a cool chord phrasing or clean break, but the execution is very problematic overall, so it's hard to find much of value to grasp onto. I'm being hard on this because I'm brutally honest, but I will pat these guys on the back for putting some effort behind this. They tried, and there's a degree of competency to the musicianship. But work on that songwriting and the recording quality before you throw down around a thousand bucks on pressing up a disc next time, okay?