Monday, October 13, 2008

Forcefed Trauma - Enslaved In Hatred EP

It's like putting whip-cream topping on your hot chocolate, only the beverage has become cold and the whip cream has turned sour. Instead of enjoying a delicious, heart warming treat, you dump out the mug's contents into the sink and go find something more rewarding. Forcefed Trauma do the whole death metal with breakdowns gimmick competently but that's about as far as they get; they have the ingredients but they are too late, the genre has turned too cold to embrace them and their take on hardcore mixed with death metal is past its prime. Instead of taking the high road and incorporating some new ideas, some interesting bursts of experimentation or even a half-way decent guitar solo, they continuously rehash done to death groove beats and pull every cliche "listen to how many balls I wished I had" riff out of their collective asses.

While I can't knock the production on the album, it is extremely generic sounding. The guitars have a slight cardboard chug to them though for the most part they have a heaviness - roughly around 180 pounds, and the bass, when left alone lacks power but has grit, yet when mixed in the music, it lacks grit yet contains some semblance of presence. The drums sound natural though I can't stand the snare-sounding-like-a-high-pitched-tom tone. I dare say there is emotion in the drumming; drummer Jim sounds half asleep at a pot-party. I guess if you like shit like God Forbid you might find it heavy though its a kind of pseudo heaviness - the heaviness lies not in the music but in what could be considered, maybe, and only for a flutter of a heartbeat, decent production.

Michel Foucault said that "the use of concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series and transformation present all historical analysis not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems." While I am oblivious to what Foucault is talking about, it sounds more interesting that any of the lyrics presented on the album. The band seemingly try to maintain a sense of "seriousness" and, possibly even, "intelligence" to the lyrics, though they all come off sounding like hollow tough guy, heard it from an angry hippie in the park one night, dung. I find it ironic that the lyrical themes of "fighting trends" and "rising up" in the lyrics really fall flat due to the entirely trendy nature of the music presented.

On a second listen, I had begun to doze off during the second song "Blinded By Greed," and was woken up by what I thought was George W. Bush giving a speech. It was only the sample beginning track three and I fell asleep again after the song started.

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