Review: Standing on a Floor of Bodies “Raised by Wolves” CD

11-and-a-half minutes of drum machine grindcore with hyper distorted vocal screams, some lower shouts, and very few songs that top a minute. The demo is divided into three acts ("Act I: The Horror of the Primeval", "Act II: The Exceptional Attempt to Cope", and "Act III: But a Breath in a Hurricane") with a few songs making up each act. It's a little hard to follow the tracklist since the first track is a blank glitch and there's one unlisted piece somewhere in there, so I could have the titles wrong, but from what I can gauge "Questioning Humanity" is slightly longer and slower with a little bit of dissonance, and that room to breathe really stands out against some of the faster and more frantic material. Most of the other songs are short flurries of blasting speed or alternately chunky chord progressions, and not many of them really stand out to me. Honestly I think the recording is doing some damage, though. There are some cool riffs, but the mix is really unbalanced and the guitar tone sounds unnatural - like it was recorded direct instead of using a mic. I'd suggest trying to use a warmer guitar tone, getting more bite to the vocals, and trying to keep the drum machines under wraps behind the more important elements. I can live with it being raw, it's the songwriting that really needs a little attention, but a stronger sound would help this out. The CD-R comes in a slim jewel case with a surprisingly effective layout using only dark shades of black and gray with high contrast artwork spanning the cover and the insert. The lyrics are often brief and deal largely with pain and suffering, not to mention revenge, but they're not totally blatant as far as what's really going on. Some portions are pretty immature in a sense, but others are really fairly interesting. "This is my testament. We live our lives in the shadow of a plague. We may have evolved from out of bloodlust, but where has it gotten us? Our home is nowhere." There are some cool ideas at work here, and I like a few of the songs, but they need to push a little harder to really drive it home. I think they could do some good stuff, but as a whole I'm not into the bulk of these songs.