Catacomb – We Shall Inherit
With better production, more diversity, and slightly faster tempos this band would have some potential. But as it stands right now, this is a pretty shoddy effort. The style is basically atmospheric metal with sneering black/death metal growls that sound sort of like a powerless Angelcorpse mixed with every typical Scandinavian black metal singer. Musically most of the songs are moderately paced, leaning towards the slower side, with lots of heavy chord progressions and synth textures alongside a few tremolo picking riffs that bring in some more black metal influences. The black metal riffs are really weak, so I would focus on adding some more excitement to the moderately paced areas (which often employ some interesting solos that suggest more ability than is being taken advantage of rhythmically), but they won’t be able to do that without nailing a better sound. Right now vocals and drums stick out the most. The vocals because they’re loud, the drums because they’re rigid and sound like a bad and inconsistent drum machine. The guitar tone is incredibly muddy, and the guitars lack volume (because they’d fuck up the entire mix if they were any louder) so there’s no clarity. They need to rework the guitar tone, balance out all of the instrumentation, and drop the vocals back in with the music. I don’t particularly find this high, snarling vocal style to fit in very well with the stronger aspects of the music, but… what can you do? The layout is really cheesy. The front cover has some sort of image of a statue or something (I can’t tell) covered by an enormous band logo complete with plenty of satanic symbols and skulls. Everything else looks even worse. There’s a poorly executed collage of band photos, a lot of shitty 3-D computer imagery and background textures, poor typefaces… all that mess. Lyrics? Try to choke this one down: “Nutriting himself with human food, Human victims trapped in tentacles, And digested by this shapeless mass…” What the hell does “nutriting” mean? That’s not even a word! I don’t know. At least the songs are pretty short, so… they’ve got some positives working for ’em. “Time’s Lurker” and “Adoration” definitely have some creative riffing going on, but I honestly don’t expect to see this band work hard enough to get to where they could and should be. – Andrew Westerhouse
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