Review Summary: 21:28 of dreadfully executed, ridiculously samey slam chug-chug-chug-chug...
When you're a band representing the more brutal side of things, putting a gory sound clip at the beginning of your tune is a pretty regular thing to do. Sometimes the bit adds to the song (“Raped By Elephants” by Torsofuck), at other times it's just an unnecessary toss-in for whatever reason. Occasionally, it manages to reflect something more, be it intentionally or not – “Virulent Rupture” starts with key jangling, some sort of car hum, unidentifiable violence noises, an unconvincingly terrified female and a nasal chortle that was supposed to come off as disturbing but ended up pathetically hilarious. The sounds were supposed to convey terror, all they end up doing is having the listener sit there, eyebrow slightly raised, and wonder why the hell did the band bother to tack something so flat and boring in the middle of their album. Why is this something more than just a sample then? The 1:07 bit of sound, with no music included, epitomizes this record surprisingly well...
Yep, ladies and germs, this album is supposed to be a heavy, terrifying, disturbing affair, whilst it just crumbles as it sloppily confronts the wall of reality face-first. Gutted Out, a young American band, decided that slam death metal is their style of choice. You have to give some props to the guys, that there actually are some fresh bands forming that do not wish to ride the deathcore cliché into oblivion... but that doesn't automatically make them good, since it takes some sort of skill and ability to execute whatever genre they pick... even if it's something as seemingly trivial to concoct as slam death metal, the most primitive of death metal genres. Slam death metal was born sometime in the mid 90's, with the first unquestionable band of the style being Devourment (there's some debate whether a few early bands can be tagged as representatives of the genre or not). With time, the branch kept evolving, and a few sub-genres (completely indistinguishable to the uninitiated) popped up. The element holding them all together is the presence of the slam in the songs – a part that could be simplified to a “breakdown” in order to give a wide scope of people a very basic idea what a slam is... however, the focus of the slam is going completely off-tempo and playing a painfully slow, chromatic, crawling riff that just gives the listener some sort of inexplicable chills, and not merely chug at empty strings with a rhythm that tries to be original. To make the impact of the slam bigger, bands keep their output full of mid-to-high paced sections, with the speed and intensity varying from act to act. A number of slam death metal fans may have thought at a point of time how an album full of merely slams may sound... consciously or not, Gutted Out attempted to answer that question.
...and the outcome isn't half as impressive as one may expect. The reasoning could be in the quality of the material, which is rather shoddy and boring, but also in their inability make anything sound more up-tempo than a quick crawl to contrast with the constant slamming in order to have the slower sections feel more powerful when they do come around. There's times when less is more, so to say... if you have a trick up your sleeve, but no idea how to add variety to it and nothing else to wrap around it, the catch is going to get old really quick. In some cases, it gets old way before a 20 minute EP is done... if the members of the band paid a little more attention while listening to the output of their much-worshiped heroes Digested Flesh, they would see that there is more to slam death metal, that a noticeable contrast between riffs is vital. Pointless theoretical considerations like this aside, perhaps the guys could pull it off if the slams were good. This isn't the case here – their take on the concept is a mundane, repetitive, overly simplistic quarter note chug with painfully foreseeable chromatic ideas. They sound like they were handicapped by their guitarist's ability to play (or, more fittingly, lack of ability to play)... good music doesn't have to be technical. But I took my nine year old sister, who never held a guitar in her life, and I taught her the weak, chuggy riff from “Masala” in about 10 minutes... the guitarist is also the one to blame for the constant slam feel, never letting the band take off the ground. Upon closer inspection, one can notice that the programmed drums do go a bit frenzy at times, as if trying to announce a non-slam section, but the limited guitar pounding in the background doesn't provide enough of a contrast to the slower parts for the listener to shrug off the weak slam feel. It's just like the “I want to be disturbing, but turn out flat and boring” sound clip, the mood of it oozing out of every drop of lackluster riffage splashed across the entire EP...
The guys do have some potential though. The vocals, typical for slam death metal, are decently executed, and the programmed drums (even if they sound completely fake and despicable an alarming percent of the time) show that the band tries to break out of the constant slam feel imposed by the limited guitarist. Their Myspace proudly announces that they are currently “writing” a full length. Hopefully it will be a step up quality wise, since this doesn't even sound “written”...
