Monstrosity - Imperial Doom
Review: Florida death metal delivered us from the tedium of "cute" and "technical" death metal by simply bashing our heads in with a staggered sequence of recursive rhythms expressing a thematic confluation between two oppositional ideas into a consonance of disharmony. Monstrosity are the wave of that destruction.
While this seems like a lot for a bunch of guys with tattoos, they are intelligent, as manifested by the "simple" complexity of structures, where they have distilled what it is they mean to communicate into ideas so well-defined variations, Slayer-style, offer no detours but complement the overall theme. Melodies here are reductively simplified, in the style of rock harmonies, but overall they follow a vocal complement that is not entirely monotone. Vocals however are savage and low-end in a thoroughly definitive and violent sense.
All-stars populate this album, from Cynic and Death guitarist Jason Goebbel on guitars with Jon Rubin, later of Malevolent Creation. Their presence is felt in their formative works, which although rough and only partially conceptualized in some places, exhibit a tremendous impetus toward exuberant explosions of violence and stampeding riffs. There's a fair amount of technical, but what makes this impressive is its sheer violence.
Traces of vestigial influence can be heard in this music, with an influence of heavy metal almost in the lines of Blood Feast or Death, but a large degree of classic death metal lexicon from Slayer to Master to Morbid Angel and beyond. Although not highly refined, this music knows what it wants to say and bashes it out with profound and anger and blissful morbidity.