Condemned
Desecrate The Vile (Re-issue)
5.2
So I signed up for this as well as Banishment’s Cleansing the Infirm, both brutal death metal, both with similar scrawly, spiky logos and Dan Seagrave wanna-be artwork, and both rather mindlessly run of the mill.
The fact this band just signed to Unique Leader Records from Lacerated Enemy Records - (also Banishment’s current label) should clue you in as to what’s on tap here; toad gurgling, brutal, slammy death metal for fans of Disgorge (whose Levi Fuselier provides some guest vocals), Devourment, Cephalotripsy (who shares members with Condemned) and a majority of Unique Leader and United Guttural (now Deathgasm) and Sevared Records roster.
I could pretty much end the review there, but I suppose I’d better throw in a few cursory comments and track titles taken straight from the early Suffocation school of track names like “Chapter of Defilement,” “Servants of Derangement,” “Internally Devoured” and “Mutilating The Inferior.” All of which blend together into one long, blurry, muddy burp and clicky drum filled mess of a record I’ve heard a thousand times before, even with atmospheric slop of closer “Amputated Repugnance.” It's not that Condemned are even trying to reinvent the wheel, they are beating the wheel with the dead horse. But this wheel has been done to death, and in an era of bands like Origin, Obscura, Severed Savior and such, this kind of completely unoriginal and utterly non descript tripe may appease some of the knuckle dragging fans of the bands mentioned in the second paragraph, and more power to them.
This rather unnecessary Unique Leader re-issue adds three bonus tracks to the original 2007 release, but you would not really know the demo versions of “Habitual Depravity,” “Subject to Infliction" and “Burial” from anything else on the album. I know there is a market for this stuff, and I at times I can appreciate some of it, but Condemned is so blatantly rehashed and derivative, I’ll simply revert to the source material when I feel the need to visit the death metal dark ages.
By the way, my upcoming Banishment review may well be a cut and paste of this review, just with (everso slightly) different so titles.
