Skull Collector
Home Of The Grave
4.5
So one minute I’m reviewing Gorod’s Process of a New Decline, being blown away by technical skill and compositional mastery in one of 2009's very best death metal albums. Then the next minute I’m listening to the second album from Belgium’s Skull Collector.
Expecting some chunky Belgium brutality (i.e. Moker or Celebrant- whose drummer used to play in Skull Collector), I was instead greeted with primal, third rate, South America sounding, gore filled Cannibal Corpse worship rendered with a murky, muddy production and the typical puerile themes from 1990. It’s not really a bad record, but the band's balance of attempted swirling discordance and scattershot complexity clashes awkwardly resulting in not so much as songs or an album, but a 26 minute exercise in patience and rather banal brutality I’ve heard 1000 times before despite the band members having a grasp of their instruments and the genre.
As much as I enjoy brutal death metal, the fact is, tracks like “Home of the Grave,” “Inseminated by a Larvae Crotch,” “Come and Se,” “Home of the Grave 2” and “To End All Pleasures” blend into one soupy, growly, forgetful visceral mess, which if you are into that sort of thing will make you happy. Personally were it not for the strange tangents in “Skullcollection,” Home of the Grave might well have been one 26 minute long song or sound check.
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