Review of Project: Failing Flesh - The Conjoined

Eric Forrest injected the vocal venom back into Voivod when Negatron dropped in 1995. Then did the same for Phobos in 1998. Way gone was the lightweight prog-rock of The Outer Limits. '95 through '98 saw the heaviest and most uncompromising of times for Voivod songwriting, dense with dissonance and sparse with any varying emotion. It's a key chemical balance when you're #1 with a bullet. Forrest took that with him into his 2003 project E-Force, which actually sounded a tiny bit like throwback bay-area thrash combined with a larger bit of that smash-face Voivodian songwriting. Pit worthy for sure, and unfortunate that it had only a one album life expectancy. Then 2005 brought Project: Failing Flesh.

P:FF is yet another project where Forrest unabashedly wears his influences like a backpack. It's the V-bomb without the superior firepower that was Piggy and Away, and it's not the handgun that was E-Force, but to their credit they still come armed to the teeth with fist fights. They straight up took names with their last outing (and debut) A Beautiful Sickness in '05, which kept the experimentation at helm, for the most part, and let the straight angled riffing to vise your attention; big blocks of dissonant chug-chugging. And when it went against the grain, it seemed so humbled and natural that it didn't splinter. The Conjoined, however, seems a tad bit starved in its attempt to genre-defy. Dutifully trudging along, pacing the middle ground, shape-shifting, as they do well.....and then they go and kill technology. Note to headbangers feeling curious: stay away from keyboards and KMFDM albums. When you mingle and get in bed, the world gets an extra ugly kid. Songs like "Regenerate" and "Motionless" are slightly unattractive. Although it's a genre in its own right, I personally do not like it when Nintendo soundtracks invade my metal, and Mario and Luigi had some obvious influence here. It may have only sounded like several seconds that they were allowed to play the keyboards, but it felt like several seconds of my life, that i can't get back.

So thank you for the saving graces that can still be found in the larger spaces in between. The black metallic tastes of "Eye of Demise", blast beating and all, or perhaps the passive aggressive "Through the Broken Lens", can serve as tiny reminders that maybe in a year or two we'll get a solid forty minutes of uninterrupted flesh, totally failing.

Release Details

Project: Failing Flesh

The Conjoined

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