Review Summary: Mechanics of Dysfunction is a desperately brutal album that unfortunately lacks the reflexive compositional work that would make any of the album’s tracks really take off.
Mechanics of Dysfunction LP
Type: Album
Release date: February 20, 2007
Label: Prosthetic Records
01 – The Surface
02 – Society’s Disposable Son
03 – The System’s Failure
04 – The Stench Of Misery
05 – Untitled
06 – Modern Age Slavery
07 – The Invisible Hand
08 – Better Off Dead
09 – Long Forgotten
10 – Sleepless
Recorded by Yannick St-Amand
Mixed by Yannick St-Amand and Pierre Remillard at Wild Studio
Mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Studio
First, let me just say right off the bat, that I absolutely LOVE the cover artwork by ex-Ion Dissonance vocalist Gabriel McCaughy. A very talented man whose presence will be sorely missed by ID fans.
Reviewers Note: Death-core is underground for Nu-Metal. It isn’t so much a genre as it is a term of extreme negative connotation, similar to the negative American connation of the label “French.” (Which, not ironically, BTM very much are, hailing from the city of Quebec.) For some odd reason, serious minded American rock fans have never accepted the idea of groove-oriented heavy metal music. If there are any parts to which you can “bob your head to,” then it automatically lacks musical merit and is instantly dismissed as worthless junk.
With that said, save for standout track Society’s Disposable Son, it took many listens for me to fully appreciate this album. Like the album cover suggest, this is an extremely cold and brutal assault on one’s senses, much in the vein of fellow Canadians Ion Dissonance and Despised Icon.
The is absolutely nothing about the production that would bring any sort of humanity to this album. The drums alone, accurately recorded with triggers, bludgeon their way through each track. In fact, save for plethora of the complex, groove-oriented breakdowns, the main “pleasure” in listening to this album is in how much collective force the band can forcibly compress into a single chord structure.
The best way to view each track is by seeing it as a progressive onslaught that builds into a denoument of a breakdown. What most reviewers fail to mention in their critique of this band is in how abstract the album actually is. The most common artistic mark made against the band is that this sort of music has been done several times over by many other bands.
While this may be true to a certain degree, the utter lack of any sort of familiar death metal chord progression is quite refreshing for somebody like myself who typically doesn’t care for most "classic" death metal.
The main criticism I may have is in the vox stylings, which unfortunately are predominantly one-note hardcore gruffs and growls. Mechanics of Dysfunction would infinitely be more enjoyable if the vocalist strove to vary his tones anywhere near to the same degree of the rest of the band.
Mechanics of Dysfunction is a desperately brutal album that unfortunately lacks the reflexive compositional work that would make any of the album’s tracks really take off. Objectively speaking, there are no true stand out moments on the album, but the obscene novelty in listening to this band take such an abstract, cold sound and obtusely subdivide it ad nauseum will keep me coming back to this album many months after its release.
