Impending Doom
Nailed. Dead. Risen.
6.3
Have you ever seen those commercials for "spiritual music" collections? You know, spreading the gospel through inspirational easy listening? Amy Grant standing up on stage while a mesmerized crowd hold each others' hands and stares up at the sky crying tears of joy... What a touching visual. Well it seems that today's "hip" Christian community is on a furious mission to prove that they are not all as earlier described. They infiltrate today's music business in all forms it seems, determined to spread their urgent message to tons of non-followers who are clearly doomed to an eternity of brimstone and sizzling on the giant grill below.
Nailed. Dead. Risen.'s album cover is kick ass to the core. Completely illegible band name dripping in gore over a church with a front yard of human skeletal assemblies decorated with clinging decayed/melted flesh, all under a blood red sky. So what can you expect from looking at the book's cover? Brutal death most likely, with guttural vocals and most likely a ton of flying pinch harmonics. At least that's what the past has confirmed 99.999% of the time. So what does the first "track", "Left Behind" bring? A one-minute long self loathing bedtime prayer. Why? Impending Doom surely must know they're going to get a lot of laughs and snickers from the majority of the metal community by putting something like that on there, and at absolute front and center no less. So once past the Kirk Cameron worship, what do we have? We have super downtuned, thickly produced guttural slam death metal. It's a style that has been around for a very long period of time, but has recently been brought to surface by the hands of bands like Misericordiam & Suicide Silence, which in turn I believe were spawned by The Acacia Strain & Happy Face, who probably listened to Eternal Suffering at one point in their lives. So what's the difference between Impending Doom's first album and the countless other brutal slam pit riff albums that have circulated the underground for almost a decade now? Besides their pro-Christian stance, the difference is a much better production and tighter musicianship, cleaning up the sound and making it better. However, that by no means makes it a "good" band or album. Admittedly, I like this style and I have liked it back when Eternal Suffering was tuning to negative F and covering "Eye of the Tiger". So, what am I trying to say, anyway? Here's the vital info: Impending Doom rocks hard and has tightened and polished a sound that I once admired greatly and was wishing underground bands of the past would put more time and effort into, because the end product would be a triple guitar layered, ultra-detuned, breakdown infested death metal pit vortex inducing drug like Nailed.Dead.Risen. It has what is valued and held high in "slam-deth society", meaning kids will be punching each other and running around like jackasses in no time. There is minimal technical prowess on hand; most riffs are just preludes to the bass-dropped breakdown to come. Is it possible to have talent while playing this style? Yes. Is it possible to show it while playing this style? Possibly, but it wouldn't fit very well between the cavemen clubbing slowdowns. So most likely not.
Impending Doom is a novelty in the sense that they play Christian gore that is heavy as fuck. Their music is a good fix if the obnoxious screeching that Suicide Silence offers isn't tolerated well by one who gets a kick out of the heavy chunk underneath. Nailed.Dead.Risen. is quite good for what it is, regardless if you dig what they have to say or not (how often is clarity in guttural vocals required, or cared about?). It's very heavy and well-produced, and shakes the foundation and your neighbor's windows when you crank it. But it also represents the direction of emphasis on mindless breakdowns in a lot of metal today. Recommended for recreational users of this style, dumb pit kids, and priests who want to expand their library of the lord's message and keep up with the times.
