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Review: Desecration - Forensix
Desecration
www.desecration.co.uk
Forensix

Label: Metal Age Productions
Year released: 2008
Duration: 29:26
Tracks: 11
Genre: Death Metal

Rating:
2.25/5


Review online: January 19, 2009
Reviewed by: Jason Cominetto
Readers' Rating
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Rated 3.25/5 (65%) (4 Votes)
Review

Musicians aspiring to be in a Death Metal act one day, take note: Forensix has everything you need to know about the genre. That's not to say this album does everything the best, or even great for the most part, but that everything that has become essential in Death Metal can be found on this album. To put it in a different way, this album plays out like one of those cheap exercise videos your stepmom always watches. Instead of mildly strenuous aerobic exercises, however, I feel like Desecration is instructing me on how to make a generic Death Metal album ("Okay now blast beat! Good good! Now you're gonna go way down on those low frets and chug the root note for awhile. Nice, you got this! Try playing some different notes so it doesn't get boring, but stay down there, and you've got the basics of Death Metal!") by showing me all the basics but never showing them done great. It's heavy, sure, and the lyrics focusing around mortuary and hospital themes are pretty brutal, but everything is just so, so... meh...

It saddens me to see a release like this go to waste. Vocalist and rhythm guitarist Ollie Jones is a practicing mortician, so the lyrics he's growling should have some sort of personal meaning behind them, but sadly mostly resort to the typical "gore is cool, dead bodies are neat, medical instruments used on people violently is br00tal" one would expect from an album with such a name and art. Instrument-wise, everything flows fine and sounds nice and heavy, but nothing is really memorable. Many songs have this sound that they're building up to something big, and epic, like nothing heard on the album before, that peters out when the instruments fail to go past their comfort zone. Most of the songs sound like a bunch of nice riffs stapled together in haste, just for the sake of making an album, and while heavy riffs are nice, if you don't counterbalance it with anything there's bound to be some monotony. Some solos would have even made the songs sound better, but there are none to be found.

It's tempting to call this album bad, but there's really nothing that Desecration have done wrong. They try their hand at showing off their skills, and sadly, do not succeed as much as I had hoped. Songs like "Dissecting the Departed" and "Aim, Fire, Kill" show that Forensix has some potential, but ultimately suffers from a severe loss of momentum. Perhaps Desecration should throw in the towel for a bit and reconsider their approach to making music; Death Metal is a genre quickly filling to the brim with imitators and look-a-likes, so being the fastest or heaviest will no longer cut it (no pun intended). Desecration should create a how-to film about Death Metal, featuring step-by-step guides on how to play the very basics of every instrument, but until then only the most ridiculously hardcore fans of the band should pick this release up.

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