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Mahjong Solitaire

Mahjong Solitaire
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Dawn of Inhumanity

13/01/2016

583

Release date: March 15th, 2010 Label: Tyrant Syndicate Type: Full-length Format: CD Catalog ID: CDVILEF277

Cover art by Dennis Dread, engineered by Adam Munoz, additional insanity on "Never Sane Again" and additional torment on "The Rotting Land (Desolation / Torment)" by Nocturno Culto, additional chaos by Fenriz. Recorded and mixed in October, 2009 at Fantasy Studios. Produced by Abscess and Adam Munoz. In June 2010, Abscess announced that "Clint Bower has left the band for personal reasons and out of respect to him and to all who have supported us for these 16 years, we have decided to call it a day."

Band members

Clint Bower Guitars, Vocals

Danny Coralles Guitars

Chris Reifert Drums, Vocals

Joe Trevisano Bass

Guest/Session

Nocturno Culto Additional torment on "The Rotting Land"

Fenriz Additional chaos on "Black Winds of Oblivion"

Miscellaneous staff

Dennis Dread Cover art

Adam Munoz Producer, Engineering

I really don't know how to feel about this album. Well, I do know exactly how I feel about the music it contains, but it's the implications of the music that have really got me worried. Abscess, once entertaining purveyors of a blend of punk and death metal, have been plumbing the depths of mediocrity for quite some time now, so it's really no small wonder that this album - their swansong, as it turns out - doesn't really do much to change the velocity (whether speed or direction would have been great, or at least merciful) of that trend. The main offenders here are the general lack of compelling riffs and songs, but on top of that perhaps the wussiest production I've ever heard on an album that had anything to do with death metal. The tragedy of it is that there's a fun album lurking below the surface of Dawn of Inhumanity. You can tell that, in the studio, Reifert was beating the piss out of his drum kit with nearly as much gusto as he's ever shown. The performance is entirely lost in translation, though. The cymbals, when you can hear them at all, are slight and distant hiss. The bass drums sound like short blips of subtle bass frequencies, not like a chain-driven beater smashing into a twenty-two inch piece of laminated polyeurethane stretched near breaking point over a wooden shell. The snare drum sounds like a pencil tapping out a rhythm on a phone book. It's got all of the soul of a washing machine and all the fury of a quadrapelegic in a persitant vegetative state. It's so much more saddening because the performance itself sounds like it has so much to offer. Listen to the shitstorm of percussion at the end of the title track and tell me that wouldn't be awesome if it was recorded in a way that did those fills even an ounce of justice. Worse, still, is that this same criticism applies to the guitars. Nickelback's guitars have more muscle than this. Again, you can tell that there's a considerable amount of distortion going on in there, but apparently whatever cables Adam Munoz uses for his recording microphones have testosterone filters in the line somewhere, because DAMN. I really, really love a nice, filthy, fuzzy and distortion soaked guitar tone. In fact, I'm of the school that a really convincing guitar tone can elevate the most pedestrian of performances into at least "hell yeah!" territory (the expression, not the shitty band). These riffs are certainly pedestrian, so without convincing tone they're utterly boring. When things are moving along at a nice clip, you can at least pretend that there might be something cool being played on a sound system located on the other side of the wall, but when they slow things down ("Never Sane Again") it's nearly painful to witness. You could put babies to sleep with this stuff, really. The lead guitars get a nice, generous handful of decibels of boost over the riffs, but since this is Abscess we're talking about, the solos aren't exactly mind-expanding affairs so instead the effect is that it highlights the total absence of testicles in the rhythm guitars. The bass suffers a similar fate, adding insult to injury. Just to clarify, for those unfortunate with the band's M.O., the riffs are most often a sort of a simple, punky, thrashy take on death metal but sometimes veer into what's supposed to be "slow and crushing" territory. The vocals are a group effort, but all of them are reverb-soaked and sometimes echo like nobody's business. Reifert's disgusting, tormented vocal vomit is particularly good (check the end of "Dead Haze"). The vocals all just sort of sort of float on a breeze above the instruments. I don't mind it a bit when vocals are nice and distinct from the guitars and all, but you could seriously drive a bus through the sonic emptiness that pervades this album. Actually, glancing over at my graphic equalizer just now during the supposedly furious verses of "What Have We Done to Ourselves?" speaks volumes. Loudness war be damned, but I'd like to at least see something going on over there. The songwriting is also a pretty mixed affair. The abovementioned track is actually a huge shot in the arm after the snore-fest that is tracks three through six. The boys from Darkthrone supposedly participated in two of those tracks, but like everything else on Dawn of Inhumanity their contributions are largely inconsequential. A tragic waste of resources, really. Which brings me back around to that general sense of malaise listening to this album brings about. I mentioned earlier how this album turned out to be the end of Abscess, but tied up in that same breakup announcement was news that Reifert, Coralles and Allen would be reforming Autopsy with Eric Cutler. Given that 3/4ths of the present Autopsy lineup has been churning out less-than-stellar Abscess records for the past decade, I have my worries. Maybe all that it will take is getting as far away from Adam Munoz as possible since the guy apparently has it in his mind that he will one day produce a death metal album that even the most curmudgeonly of grandmothers wouldn't find offensive to the ears. Pick this up only if you're a gigantic Abscess fanboy and still have Horrorhammer in your daily rotation. Autopsy fans who might mistakenly believe this is a stepping stone from the cesspool of Abscess' recent mediocrity into the future of the Autopsy reunion will be completely disappointed and should just turn the other way and listen to Mental Funeral and cross their fingers.