666sharon666
MMA Reviewer's Challenge August 2017 – Randomly selected previously unreviewed 2017 release.
Brutal death metal is a genre designed to push the death metal sound to its most extreme. I've always been under the impression that doing that this is the easy part. The hard part would be doing it in such a way that an album stands out in some way. One man act of Alexander Paul (Organectomy), Rendered Helpless, from New Zealand, is back with his second album under the name, Entities of Transdimensional Emergence, which shows a lot of promise for this young artist in the genre.
The album contains nine tracks and only lasts a total of 28:20 minutes. We're talking short tracks that waste no time, just do their business, and then they're over, so in that sense the structure of the album is fairly typical of the genre. Speaking of which, Entities of Transdimensional Emergence is technically more of a slam death metal album and this is the main feature of the music. The style is bit monotonous on the surface, but I found that I had little trouble listening to the whole album in one go, though it's definitely in its favour to have such a short length. Regardless being able to listen to the whole thing in one go is the first hurdle crossed when it comes to genres like brutal/slam death metal, so in my book that puts Rendered Helpless that much closer to the head of the pack. Also working in this album's favour is that there are a few other influences that can be picked up on in music if you listen past the slams, notably a bit of death-doom metal in the slower parts.
This album isn't my typical thing by any means, so it isn't the easiest of albums for me to write about. The most positive thing I can say in its favour is that it's an album from a genre that, while I don't completely dislike it, largely find uninteresting and I actually do quite like this one, though it's not something I'd revisit very often.