Review Summary: When it seemed that Waking The Cadaver could only go up, they managed to spectacularly plummet down in flames.
Banality is one of the most unwelcome and frequent faults in musicians, and unoriginality often nearly ruins an otherwise solid release. Rarely, however has there been a band as offensively cliche and bromidic as Waking the Cadaver. Every negative stereotype of deathcore was lovingly embraced by this New Jersey quintet. This, along with a general lack of quality, lead to an overwhelmingly negative response to the band’s first demo tape. One could only hope that in the time between the release of the demo and the first full-length album,
Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler, Waking The Cadaver would mature as artists, expanding past the generic, below-average deathcore for which they became infamous. But a single look at
Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler‘s cover, which unashamedly displays a group of bodies spontaneously exploding into small chunks of flesh as a muscular overlord shoots them with a shotgun, immediately put such outlandish notions of growth and development to rest.
Waking The Cadaver’s sound remains largely unchanged. Uninventive blast beats provide a rhythm, boring and trite tremolo-picked riffs lie on top, the bassist is unheard and is quite possibly also non-existent, and a vocalist with the voice of a pig being branded still squeals delightfully about various people dying in various ways. The band religiously obeys the aforementioned formula for a standard deathcore song, and is content with almost never deviating from it or showing any traces of creativity. Frequently, a breakdown occurs to disrupt the linear path of the music, and a slow chug is played. However, these segments are so dull and unoriginal that instead of creating variety and making the composition more interesting, they stick out like a sore thumb, being the most bland ideas in a sea of vapidity. These perfunctory breakdowns manage to make the already substandard music become everything but physically painful.
Waking The Cadaver is almost every bit as stagnant lyrically as it is musically. No new themes are touched upon, so rape, death, and mutilation are still the only topics the listener will be exposed to. The lyrics still contain excessive amounts of profanities and still struggle fruitlessly to make the band members seem imposing and cruel. Many parts are so hilariously inane that they add to a general air of pathetic faux-virility and manliness. Enjoy:
I have the extreme urge to mash something.
Your face the perfect object.
Swift blow,
Cold steel cracking your skull.
Relentlessly smashing the skull of this victim.
Lifeless body i hold in place, damn this motherf***** ain't even got a face.
The blood spray hits my face so i get a taste, which enlightens my curiosity for cannibalism.
-Tire Iron Emblugeonment
In the end, Waking The Cadaver’s first full-length is nearly a carbon-copy of the demo tape. All of the new material sounds identical to the demo tracks, and the band continues to refuse showing any signs of progression. In fact, the only significant difference between the album and the demo is that
Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler is twenty six minutes long, while the demo lasts for only five. And so, Waking The Cadaver did the impossible with the release of their first album: they became even worse.
