Review Summary: A sick album featuring sick people doing even sicker things...again!
Devourment is once again doing what they are doing best! Don’t get too excited though because that’s in fact the problem here. They are once again mediocre, somewhat boring and is still an average band within an average genre of music.
The lyrics don’t even come close to the likes of Cannibal Corpse. It lacks the whole “Hey! I think I am offended" thing and are just plain childish. Writing these kinds of lyrics seems like a thing in the past when parents were actually but-hurt by that stuff and when controversy in music was something elevated. It was daring back then, but now it’s not. The album cover for Conceived in Sewage is at least a bit cool now that we are mentioning controversy and we should all be really happy that it doesn’t look like Molesting the Decapitated, but not that it matters because I wouldn’t really recommend buying this. When I come to think of it, Molesting The Decapitated was actually a pretty raw and foul album which gave you (with a small amount) some kind of disturbing feeling. This does not, which is disappointing considering that they tried so hard with it. The song Legalize Homicide is just awe-inspiring. Why they hell would the legalization of homicide ever be a good idea? I know that they are just trying to be cruel, but they kind of went overboard with stupidity one that one. For being one of the more stupid songs it's actually one of the better, so it's not all bad.
The vocals are bad. Not completely awful, but bad. The vocals are guttural growls with occasional screams which sounds terribly wrong and out of place. When the vocalist grunts are the most enjoyable moments and they are actually good. They should have had more of that instead of the excessive use of guttural burping. And it’s not the cool kind of burping like in Demilich, but the dumb kind like in…Devourment. The guitar riffs are a bit muffled and the drums are mixed way to high. The riffs are overall decent with certain occasion where they actually are really cool.
It just seems like all songs drag beyond belief. After about 50% of one song has passed I tend to skip it, but just to hear that the next song sounds exactly the same. What a bummer. The song 50 ton war machine is horrible and the lyrics are awful, but at least it slams pretty hard. Conceived in Sewage slams hard overall so if you’re a fan of that I would actually recommend this. If you have been a Devourment fan before this I would also recommend Conceived in Sewage.
Devourment is at least a progressing band and it’s obvious that they are trying to get better. Conceived in Sewage was just a small step for the band, but it was at least not a big plunge into the deep.
