Machinemade God
The Infinity Complex
4.3
Good lord, have you ever heard this before? Hailing from Germany (where fucking else), Machinemade God have brought to us their first full-length album, entitled The Infinity Complex, via Metal Blade after recording only a single demo. See where this is headed yet? These dudes have but one desire, it appears, and they pursue it with seriously zealous intensity: Machinemade God want to sound like Unearth. So, do they? Yup, more or less. Do they fuck up spectacularly along the way? Nah. Is a moment of the proceedings memorable or anything less than utterly redundant? Hoo boy, if you couldn’t figure it out earlier you ought to be able to now.
As per usual, there’s only so much to be said about this style of metalcore nowadays. There are guitar riffs. Sometimes they are galloping. Sometimes they’re harmonized. Sometimes they’re galloping AND harmonized. The riffs are sometimes interrupted by breakdowns (and by sometimes, I mean approximately three to five times per track, as you’d expect), which are…um stout and rumbling, I suppose. What superlatives is one supposed to use to describe an album on which platitude reigns supreme? Machinemade God seem determined to plow through every cliché associated with this particular style of ‘core, and do a damn thorough job of it throughout The Infinity Complex. You’ve got your melodramatic song titles (“Kiss Me Now Kill Me Later,” “Injected Smiles,” “Fuck Your Dead Heart” fer chrissakes), your obligatory clever-jab-at-the-scene song title (“Friendster Is Sooo Two Months Ago”), your acoustic interlude (outro “Snow White” in this case), your BR00TAL opening number (“Teeth Vs. Curb”), your Crest-sparklin’ bassy production, your Gothenburger scream, your blood/wings/butterflies layout…the list goes on. The music, as I said earlier, is an approximation of The Oncoming Storm-era Unearth, and not particularly exciting.
I’m sure everyone who’s been waiting on this “much anticipated” (the band’s words, not mine) album will instantly fly into a rage at me for not giving The Infinity Complex a fair shot and maybe they’re right too. Hell, there could be a cool riff or two buried in there, but finding them isn’t worth clawing my way through the adamantium wall of insipidity surrounding this record. Desperate metalcore junkies will eat this up, ‘serious’ metalheads will frown dourly at them for doing so, and I will advise the reader to shell out for one of the dozens of stellar metalcore releases currently available instead of for this creative vacuum.
