Wurdulak is just one of the many side projects from the infamous musician Killjoy. Infamous not for church burnings and/or public preaching to Satan, but for hosting an infinite number of completely useless bands and contributing with endless nonsense to others, including Killjoy, Necrophagia, and Viking Crown. Useless they are, because they all more or less represent the same musical qualities of Killjoy’s last fad, and by no means is this album, Severed Eyes Of Possession, an exception. With the help of several other musicians known in the extreme underground (particularly Maniac of Mayhem fame, who shares vocals with Killjoy), Killjoy created a half-as
sed album holding hardly any water. For this band, he decides to play a clean-cut style (production wise) of Black Metal mixed a Death/Thrash combo. As expected, Severed Eyes Of Possession is a simplistic listen. Simple music. Simple vocals. Simple song structures…simple everything. Sickly simplistic. Just imagine blast beats, old school Black Metal riffs, and harsh vocals with some clean guitar added. As such, this makes for a quite easy listen. But for all it’s worth, Possession can come off as trying too hard, or the product of a lazy musician bringing round the mill ideas to an overcrowded genre(s), or, most accurately, both.
As well as being simple, nearly everything sounds rushed. Vocals come off sloppily, the drumming is rehashed and has been used by countless other bands, and guitar parts seem to be thrown in at the last minute. Take Xisnasusania, an example of both the ‘trying too hard’ and the ‘rushed’ aspects of Severed Eyes Of Possession. Lasting under a minute and fifteen seconds, it is solely a clean guitar piece. Of course, many bands could and have managed to pull this off quite magnificently. However, Killjoy wants to have the over-saturated theme of ‘evil’ in his albums, and consequentially, Xisnasusania pushes too hard for a scary and dark atmosphere with outlandish chords and a polished tone that is, predictably, the unraveling of it all. How it could make the cut for any album, we will never know. This statement holds true for every other clean part on the album too, the clean sections which, sadly, has a lot of say on the album. Whether thrown in to make the track longer or a premature idea that makes a song that more dreadful, by the end of listening, one will indefinitely opinionate that the album would have been better off without the ‘dynamics’ on Severed Eyes Of Possession. Not only because they sound pathetic, but because they don’t build on anything in the song and contribute even less. One must also note the highly amusing title track, with a twinkle of a couple of chimes counter-parted with some gross, gurgling noises; a horrible, Bollywood sort of attempt to make the listener feel unnerved and uneasy. If this were anywhere else on the album, you would have been annoyed that the album had been interrupted. But as this is the end of the album, you can just laugh it off and ponder at what a horrible closer that was.
Yet it doesn’t stop there. As well as being predictable, forgettable, childish, or absurd, the main downfall of the album is that is has no support system. By that I mean once you hear one flaw, another one rises, and then another, and another, and another…it keeps piling on. And not especially because the tracks are bad. Some are quite decent. And by decent I mean standard. By standard I mean stock, and by that I mean boring, boring extreme music. Only two songs on here are really worth your time; and these are the saviors of this album. Unified Global Misanthropy, a definite testimony to the headbangable grooves and catchy riffs and a shred solo worthy of Metal; and Sin Eater, a similar but more Death oriented track (all weak pinch harmonics aside…). But the rest of the album is a sinking ship. The occasional section in a paticular song might grab you, but after these moments pass, you begin to process that either
a) You've heard this part before, or
b) You've heard a variation of this part before.
And trust me when I say that I have tried listening to this album with a different mindset. Because it’s well obvious, with the obnoxious and over the top cover, the ridiculous band photos, and the general quality of the music that they themselves do not take this project seriously at all. But even with all those conditions, listening to the album is not so much a pain more than it is irritating.
Full of nuisances and littered with unfulfilled ideas and streaked with the marks of impatient songwriting, Severed Eyes Of Possession is a sure step into obscurity by a band that should have left the world alone in the first place.
