Review Summary: Same problems remain, but now grown even worse.
There’s a lot of ways to be impressed by an album and it’s not always positive. In the world of slam death metal, where brutality is the law that prevails even at the cost of music itself, bands have a clear objective: be as heavy as possible and never look back. They proceed towards it with tunnel vision much like a hungry predator in frenzy, and the result is almost always the same sort of monotonous chugfest, that nevertheless still seems to be an idiot proof recipe for enjoyment of the fans of this microgenre. Names like Abominable Putridity and Cephalotripsy came out with some solid material in this fashion around 15 years ago, but a lot has happened since. Enter Extermination Dismemberment.
Commentary on this case can already begin from the band name, as well as the cover art of the album. While the depicted, apocalyptic situation becomes clear after a few seconds of staring, it is made in such a way that it causes the same sigh of frustration as when you watch an overproduced movie, bleached in CGI. It’s also not nicely made, being more like a collage of random pictures made by an angry teenager, than an actual digital design with at least some merit. Clocking at 53 minutes in total, it might be the longest album of the kind too and had me wondering, is there really so much slamming brutal death metal to compose generally?
Having listened to Serial Urbicide, the band’s previous album from 10 years ago, I was aware of the band’s tactics and for Dehumanization Protocol, they continue with the same attitude but this time, stretched to infinity in all directions. The whole body of this album is a stream of constant, beating slam riffs one after the other, almost distorted at the studio to be as heavy and as loud as modern software can make songs nowadays. Tempos are rarely fast, instead mostly middle-paced sections that you can dance to if you want, only turning even slower when they’re trying to get even heavier, a common practice in brutal death metal and deathcore today.
The butchery of the sound of Dehumanization Protocol becomes really clear in a few breakdown parts especially in the first part of the record, which are clearly meant to its most barbarous moments, but fail miserably. In "Plague in the Guise of Flesh", “Terror Domination”, “Protonemesis”, or the self-titled track, there’s always a point where the band flashes an ultra slow breakdown with ridiculous loudness, that converts everything to a literal wall of noise and all the rest of the instruments have to quiet down and give way. Honest intentions, but the outcome is as annoying as something scratching your ears from the inside, simply unbearable.
There’s a couple of tracks that are fine but can’t save the day, like for example “Ruins of Armageddon”, which is also 8 minutes long (!!) and contains all the elements of the album, combined and at an acceptable delivery. Frankly, just listen to that song and nothing else from here. Sometimes, such stuff is definitely fun to go through, but fall apart when you actually start processing what you’re listening to. In Dehumanization Protocol, that is mindless grooves, mindless slam and painstakingly loudness-boosted production. As in the futuristic samples of armageddon used in the beginning and end of the album, machines have also taken over Extermination Dismemberment’s music.
