Review of Project: Failing Flesh - A Beautiful Sickness

So Candlelight rescues this year old demo from Karmageddon Media, slaps a new cover on it, and releases it as a full album with no changes whatsoever. Why? My guess A) is because former Voivod and E-Force singer Eric Forrest is the vocalist, and B) Sci-Fi /cyber metal is suddenly popular this year (Kyroburn, Total Devastation, Scorngrain already so far). Still, the music on A Beautiful Sickness, while competent, isn’t really that exciting. Again, maybe I’m just overloaded on the cyber metal genre.

A slightly less death metal Fear Factory might be a decent comparison (and driving force for this release possibly considering their 'comeback') , with robotic, mechanical riffs, lots of electronic sampling and a mix of gruff throaty shouts and cleaner crooning. There’s some solid precise percussion that carries the cybernetic atmosphere and the guitars have a metallic crunch purveying some adequate riffs, but I never feel too enamored with what comes across as entirely contrived.

When stepping out of their hydrollic powered robotic guise and trying something a little more boundary breaking like the monumental and discordant strings that litter “9mm Movie”, things are a little more interesting, but when simply belting out electronica laced(basically, buzzing, whirring and beeping), recycled Fear Factory riffs like “Scene of The Crime”, “Entrance Wound”, and “Taste of the Lie”, it simply makes the album averagely entertaining in a genre with far more dynamic choices.

The production (identical to the demo) is impressive though, with a suitably motorized sounding delivery that gives the often stagnant riffs brief, pulsing life, but other than the aforementioned “9mm Movie”, and a few bars of “Highwire Act”, nothing really keeps my interest that long. Throw in a strange choice of covers in Venom’s “Warhead” - why didn’t they just cover “Demanufacture” or “Edgecrusher” and be done with it?

Candlelight didn't have to do anything with this demo before they released it as a full length debut album, and that's a credit to the professionalism and production already in place, but song wise they could use an influx on new ideas.

Release Details

Project: Failing Flesh

A Beautiful Sickness

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