My Face Just Got Ripped Off
I’m not a guy who plays computer games, and my knowledge of said genre of entertainment borders to the non-existant. In all honesty, I prefer to read books, write or doodle rather to subject myself to the ”deadeye”… it’s simply too boring.
So when I read about the Scottish band Cerebral Bore a couple of months ago the real meaning of the band name totally escaped me (apparently it’s some ”amazing head exploding weapon” in the Turok game-series), and a snicker emerged from my lips; here we had something that was described as ”technical/brutal Death Metal” with the word ”Bore” in its name… how fitting. You see, me and tech-death have a somewhat iffy relationship. When seeing that a band is described as such, my hackles rise in defense, and make me think of bands like Braindrill and Necrophagist; bands that seem to indulge in fretboard acrobatics, mind-numbing note-sweeping and scale gymnastics, rather than writing good and coherent songs.
But these guys were supposed to be good, so I decided to check them out (albeit with low expectations and the same enthusiasm as a visit to the dentist entails). And damn, I’m happy I did.
Cerebral Bore doesn’t play ”tech-death” in its vile incarnation of mindless wankery, but rather modern Death Metal with Suffocation-esque brutality and more than a couple of nods to the ”None So Vile” era Cryptopsy and a splash of old school melodies to boot. And most important of all; it sounds fresh and interesting.
Cerebral Bore has a drive and groove that is hard to resist, and while many Death Metal fans abhor break-downs in this genre like it’s some kind of infectious disease, I certainly don’t mind them if they don’t take over completely, and Cerebral Bore place them with surgical precision. And this is a key element to this debut; the pacing and general feeling that the songs are thought through. The shower you in ferocious blastbeats when it’s called for and have the decency to throw in almost rocking parts that bludgeon you silly, like concrete fists to the chin.
The recording is balanced soundwise, and every instrument is allowed to shine in the performance. I love how bassist Kyle Rutherford throws in his signatures in contrast to Paul McGuire’s guitarplaying, while drummer Allan MacDonald acts like a spastic octopus behind the kit. And I know that the vocals will get mentioned in every review of Cerebral Bore. Why? Because this brutal Death Metal act has got a female vocalist. Without going into a rant how I absolutely loathe how some people judge females in extreme music on the basis that they are ”just girls” (the ”good for being a girl”-attitude pisses me off to no end) or how scantily clad they are, I’m just going to state that Simone Pluijmers out-growls many of her male collegues by light years; she growls, roars and grunts like some primordial cave-bear. And while I can see that some people thinks it’s too much of the ”pig-squeal” type of Death-grunts in some instances, it fits perfectly. The problem with this kind of thundering growls is that they easily become boring in their monotony, but Pluijmers get around that pitfall by utilizing rythmic phrasing and punctuation. While this doesn’t make the lyrics any more discernable, it makes the vocals feel more like a part of the whole performance instead of just being a cavernous background droning, as well as enhancing the aggression inherent in the music.
What makes this record stand out among its peers is the sense of balance, which in my humble opinion is quite rare when it comes to this kind of extreme metal. It’s too easy to just retort to either technical excercises (and by that forgeting the actual need for a song), or to just blast-blast-blast (in which case I’d rather listen to grind), two traps that Cerebral Bore skillfully avoids while obliterating everything in their way. Outstanding debut.
Verdict: 8
