"And I thought Circle of Nine Was Bad"
First of all, I must point out to everyone that this is NOT and I repeat, NOT, slamming or brutal at all. I’m sick of reading comments made about “OMG, this is ttly SlaMing and Hevy!” because the fact is, it’s not. All the components and elements that you’d typically expect from a normal slamming death metal band are as follows; heaviness, brutality (obviously), darkness and of course abrasiveness. There is and absence of any of those elements in the Sleeper EP, and if they actually existed (which is something I highly doubt), I’m definitely having trouble hearing it. Ok, sure, there may be some few “moments” of slamming brutality but a few moments does not equate to the entire EP or band being brutal. It’s like saying that We Butter the Bread With Butter is pure screamo, because of the track “Superföhn Bananendate”, or saying that Whitechapel is progressive deathcore because of some of the “moments” in the track “The Somatic Defilement”. It’s illogical, and wouldn’t make sense to any sane individual. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, let me put their music into perspective by breaking up the components of their sound and re-building them.The first step is to obtain djent and progressive technical metalcore song structures and guitar riffs. The second step is to deepen the tone of the guitars and add a little bit of extra distortion. The third step is to throw in some drumming, but not just any drumming… wait, scratch that, any drumming would do. Step four is to add some random synthetic sounds that have absolutely nothing to and completely unrelated to the rest of the music. Now all you have to do is make a cover and flip to a random page in the dictionary and place your finger anywhere on that page and there’s the EP title! Hey presto! You’ve just made the Sleeper EP (Sleeper? What the fuck, seriously?). Now I bet you’re probably thinking “but you forgot the slams and brutality”, don’t you mean… Disfiguring the Goddess have forgotten the slams and brutality? C’mon, let’s be reasonable, apart from the very few faint traces throughout Sleeper, Disfiguring the Goddess is not brutal death metal at all.
Oh no, NOT THE SYNTHETICS AGAIN! There was one thing that I just couldn’t stand about Circle of Nine, and that was the synthetics. Those keyboards and other computer generated sounds were so annoying! Not only are the synthetics back, but Disfiguring the Goddess have brought them to the forefront of their music. Yep, all those chimes, harps, choir and other randomly generated sounds are littered in random spots throughout Sleeper (25 Achievement Points if You Spot Them All!) and they are much worse than before. The one thing that I could possibly say about Circle of Nine is that they didn’t go overkill on the synthetics, but then again, there shouldn’t, really be any synthetics anywhere in brutal death metal. However in Sleeper, they are more than over-used and have little to no direction to them which gets me to ask: why are they there in the first place? because they aren’t contributing to the overall music quality. I believe that the synthetics are the worst part of The Sleeper, namely because they brought back that annoying choir keyboard sounds which drive me up the fucking wall. There is one point in the track “Queen Kingdom” where there is nothing but the choir keyboards playing which is without a doubt, the most annoying, most retarded and worst part of the EP. You could not believe how much I needed to pour a bottle of bleach in my ear canals just to not hear this. I know this is brutal death metal and all, but I should get happy angry when I listen to this, not angry angry… which is what is happening to me now.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t give a flying fuck stick about whether or not Cameron (the original founder of Disfiguring the Goddess) also specialises in making electronic music. Ok, I respect that he may, perhaps be good at making electronic dance music and he is also fucking good at creating pure brutal death/deathcore (as heard in Disfiguring the Goddess’s previous works) but he cannot cross the two together. I’m sure that there are means an ways of crossing the two together to make some brutal death metal that sounds a least half decent, however, Cameron just simply doesn’t posses those skills… now look what happened.
It seems that the more I listen to The Sleeper, the more I wonder why I’ve actually bothered to listen to it, or better yet, why I bothered to continue listening to this EP after the very first track. I know that deathcore and brutal death metal have the reputation of being really redundant and loopy genres, but at least other bands have some kind of variation to their sound. Unlike Disfiguring the Goddess, because on Sleeper, all you need to do is listen to the first track and you’ve heard it all. All the vocals, all the riffs, all the synths and all their retardedness can be experienced in a single track. Also, the way that the tracks are laid out in the EP makes no sense either. There is not intro or outro, or anything with leads up to a climax. In fact, I couldn’t even spot a climatic point in any of the tracks in Sleeper. This really disappointed me because, like in Circle of Nine, there were times where I could feel an extremely strong build up of tension to where I was expecting a heavy ass breakdown to come at the end. But time after time, they keep missing or ignoring those opportunities which tend to leave holes in the music. Holes which they have chosen to fill with silly out-of-place synthetics and other random shit.
What confuses me however, is why people continue to argue whether or not the vocalist inhales or exhales, but considering the fact that this is literally the worst excuse of death metal I’ve heard, why bother? because the vocals are the least of your worries. They only oscillate from extremely high pitch to extremely low pitch with no sense of depth or extra dimension. You know how you get that feeling when you know that a band has definitely used a drum machine to produce their music because it sounds awkwardly monotone and sterile. Well, that’s what the vocalist from Disfiguring the Goddess sounds like. So inhales, or exhales, it doesn’t count for shit either way.
Taking everything I’ve mentioned into account, I think I’ve firmly stated why I believe that this EP was obviously a rushed job and why Disfiguring the Goddess is now officially a skid mark on the underwear of brutal death and deathcore. To be fair, the only track that I thought that was listenable was “Daughter of Depths”. “Daughter of Depths” was actually heavy and sounded at least something like brutal death. Everything else, forget about it. I think I’ve thoroughly gone through the reasons why I think; Sleeper is NOT slamming death metal, Sleeper has terrible (and I mean terrible) synthetics and electronic elements and the sheer redundancy of the EP overall. There is very little scope and depth to Sleeper at all. If it wasn’t for the track “Daughter of Depths” I would probably say that Sleeper is worth maybe -1 or -2/20, but today I think it deserves a 1/20. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve lost all respect for Disfiguring the Goddess, and there is no way in hell that I’m going to be lining up to buy their upcoming album.
1/20
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