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Cerebrum: Spectral extravagance
22/01/10 || Smalley
I was hoping a band that could get George Kollias of Nile to drum for them would be at least somewhere near decent, but I guess not; Cerebrum did put some good stuff on “Spectral extravagance”, but also a bunch of shit as well. I’ll tackle the good stuff first, which starts with how Kollias gives a characteristically intense drum performance all throughout the record (hell, he drums better for Cerebrum than he did for Nile!). Madness. In addition, Cerebrum’s vocalist has a nice, dark, deep death growl going for him (most of the time, at least), and although they’re a bit too sparsely-placed, every single guitar solo on the record is excellent.
Okay, enough with the good-cop routine; the thing that ultimately brings down this album, the 800 pound gorilla in the room that no amount of good performances can hide, is the jumbled, misguided, shaky songwriting, with a bunch of random pauses and tempo switch-ups (which I hate) that break up whatever momentum the music was building up. It’s like Cerebrum threw a bunch of death metal parts into a big bag, shook it all up, and just emptied the resulting tangled mass onto CD and called it a day. You guys wanna learn how to make properly intense, frantic death metal? Listen to “Onset of putrefaction”. Or perhaps “Organic hallucinosis”. Or a bunch of other good death metal albums, and take as much time with them as you need, just so long as you don’t make something like this again.
Along with the weak songwriting, the drum sound here adds to “Spectrum”‘s shit pile, coming a bit too close to the infamous “St. anger” clank for comfort, doing Kollias’s excellent performance no favors at all. The bass sound isn’t any good either, due to its annoyingly thick, burp-y sound which keeps drawing too much attention away from the rhythm guitar, and while I do like some variety with my metal bands, the vocalists occasional attempts at clean singing are very ill-advised.
But, even with all these complaints about the songwriting and the sound problems, I can still sense some potential in Cerebrum, since there was an occasional good riff here, and with work, they could actually become the bad-ass, dominating death metal band they’re trying to be. They’re just going to have to work a lot on their songwriting to become that, and fix their myriad of sound problems as well, both of which I’m not too hopeful that they’ll actually do. Anyway, in the future, pick your cameos better, Kollias!
- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Lacerated Enemy
- Website: www.cerebrum.gr
- Band
- Apollon Zygomalas: vocals
- Jim Touras: guitar
- Mike Papadopoulos: guitar
- George Skullkos: bass
- George Kollias: drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Fragments Of Illusion
- 02. Scatter-Brain
- 03. Pattern Of Fear
- 04. Intolerable Ado
- 05. Epiphysis Thrive
- 06. Edge Of Parallel Circles
- 07. Beyond Imagination
- 08. Thorns Of Weakness
- 09. Salvia Divinorum
- 10. The Prologue Of Completion
- 11. Shreds Of Remains
