Lightning Swords Of Death
The Extra Dimensional Wound
6.5
Beyond the fact that their name sounds like some sort of "finishing move" for a gravity-defying, pointy-haired Japanischer video game fighter, I'd say the biggest thing standing in the way of this band and their new record making a ripple with yours truly is the startling awareness that their sound could actually use more lightning, more swords and more death. As it stands, there's simply not enough woven into the tapestry of The Extra Dimensional Wound to strike the killing blow. Nearly every tune presented, save for the slightly more interesting 11-minute closer, needs an added razor hook to help pull the vitals onto the floor. Blackened battle metal of this capacity craves the occasional burst of electricity to accompany the endlessly rumbling bottom-end. An occasional Azagthoth fret-bolt to split the nightsky would be really nice; or even a far less technical Rick Rozz whammy assault would probably help matters quite a bit. The bottom line is this: just pepper the bloody slab with something.
It's even more of a bummer considering the amount of potential you can obviously hear in the band. The bass tone alone, for example, is SICK and could probably knock the treads right off a Bolt Thrower Panzer (seriously, this guy's strings sound heavy enough to haul skiers up a slope). And the one-two strike of drum battery and Roskva's (Endless Blizzard) tight, heavy riffing is certainly vicious enough at any given moment to convince someone sampling a single tune or two that I'm finally ready to be taken behind the proverbial woodshed for an old nag's end. But, as countless bands before have affirmed, and undoubtedly countless bands yet to come will prove again, you gotta throw down some relish and hot mustard if you expect folks to consistently come back for more. Not to say what LSoD is currently delivering crudely represents hooves, lips and assholes knotted inside some edible casing, but hopefully you get the drift -- wrap some bacon around that sumbitch, fellahs.
Based on how much I dug the last release from Roskva's other blizzardly project, and partly because of how zuper-wünderbar this album cover is, I was really hoping to crawl out of this experience more mangled, bloody and thusly enlivened. Unfortunately, I couldn't dig up much for highlights beyond the aforementioned bass-tone, perhaps the whip-crack accompaniment in "Damnation Pentastrike" and the brutal way "Nihilistic Stench" closes. The rest continually passed right across the brain-pan mostly unnoticed as I distracted myself with YouTube vids of fat kids falling, flipped through comics/magazines, or basically did any number of other things a person does when their attention fails to be held. Perhaps the true brutality of The Extra Dimensional Wound would be better delivered live from the stage, as is often the case, but as of right now, I'm still waiting for a vicious extreme metal band to properly tear my head off in 2010.
