Carbonized - Screaming Machines
Review: ...and it all falls apart, when the line delineated in the first album between rigidity of impression and flexibility of enclosing structure is breached, and suddenly, that which was once an artistic desire to stimulate inward expression through outward invention swaps sides and the internal becomes dominated by the external, making a novelty mess of a once-great band.
Not surprisingly, this happened at the same time both Entombed and Therion let go of the aethereal for the tangible results of popularity, media coverage, album sales and real-world political power. The drums and guitars mesh like early grindcore in the style of the first album, but the collage of deconstructed parts -- portable, defensive, pre-reactionary home made of discards like that of a hermit crab -- cloaks rather than silhouettes meaning, and the result is that all of its awkward and deliberately shocking moments become abrasive noise to the ear.
Gone are the transcendent melodies. Gone is the abstract view of a creative mystic looking past horizons. What emerges instead is novelty, in a screeching, dischordant, insistent and bratty form.