Review Summary: Technically and brutally inclined
Out from the remains of Nocturnal Silence, Disavowed plant their feet in an opportunity for a new profile. A profile derived about from some of the top death metal acts of today, such as Dying Fetus, Vader, and even Suffocation. Twisting their influences around to create a cohesive and technical album, while still holding to their roots of brutality, Disavowed can finally break out into the great battle of death metal, unfortunately only to be long since left behind and forgotten.
Though they may not be the biggest act, their demo has proved them to be a somewhat worthy product, and a good edition to the field, and when their first full-length album entitled
Perceptive Deception, was released in 2001, this was recognized, if even for only a small time by the heavy metal eggheads of the new century, as the coming of a new age of technical brutal death metal, if such a genre had ever existed before. About six years later, Disavowed haven’t been seen taking the offensive as hard as what was perceived, but
Stagnated Existence would come to fix that, slightly anyway.
Stagnated Existence shows the equation for a simplistic, and album revolving mainly around the technicality, and brutality that you can expect to find as soon as you open the small pages to the bands' discography. Although this albums' primary objective is to mash the elements together, and still appear to have an intelligible design, and even have some catchiness to it, I would have to argue that instead, this album primarily comes off as the epitome of obscure influence from more well-known brutal death bands, as stated earlier. Differentiating from its predecessor,
Stagnated Existence will take you on a journey not towards Origin, or Suffocation, but to more sharp sounding bands such as Aborted, or Dying Fetus, either way you go, this album has brutality at every corner, practically a copy/paste effect from our favorites, something not most smaller bands can do well.
On note of the bands look to more technical grounds, a huge portion of this album you'll find takes most of its catchiness from sharp snare drums, and an audible bass. Rather than attacking with raging solos in every song, several small interludes of incredibly fast drum and bass sections are included to every song, while the vocalist continues on through this with incredibly low-key growling. Though many bands do this today, Disavowed display how capable they are of creating and bending these traits at will. Coming in as a short production, this mere 33 minute album has catchiness at every corner, it just never gets boring, thus, the albums' greatest triumph.
With not much to say about individual songs, considering many of them sound the same, giving the impression that this album is just one continuing song, it is relevant to mention the flow of this album, which is incredibly smooth. It is really easy to see how Disavowed are letting the heavy riffs fly right out of the amp, instead of over thinking this production, which only adds to the albums' decency. However, catchy this album may be, it is still hard to ignore the fact that it's not going to be something that can last. While it doesn't drag on, songs like
Restricted Conception or
Stagnated show signs of missing levels of coherent musical writing. As Nils Berndsen (bass) is seen triumphing on this album, he occasionally manages to get lost in an album so simple, it's hard to tell how he comes about this issue. Even Robbe K (vocals) can be seen lowering the scale a little bit, as he is already showing signs of hardship, and by the time the album almost comes to an end, you can be glad it did, because he has always had a problem with ideas, and coming up with them. His vocals are amazing, don't mistake that for a second, but he is the real reason this album didn't go flying off the scale. If his imagination could just fly off the rail for a little bit, this could've been a classic, with no argument.
So in the end, the album shows the best signs of Disavowed being serious with their efforts to bring their reputation back, long since abandoned with Nocturnal Silence, but end of playing themselves out with a restraint on their overall creativity that just isn't expressed to the fullest potential in
Stagnated Existence[/i]. It had the riffs, it had the catchiness, and the technicality mashed with the brutality proved to show that the band is good at manipulating other band's ideas to create their own, but as soon as the band started believing it was enough, that was where the album started making the inevitable downhill trend back to obscurity, which is where the band lies now.
