After trying for the ten thousandth time to like Immolation because by all intelligent measures I should, I gave up yesterday. I like individual songs. The albums as a whole are like a distracted child, occasionally brilliant but too often petulant or prosaic, hammering out variations on known themes. The old accusation "but all their songs sound the same" isn't true, but it's true that many are very similar. There's a lack of a certain kind of consistency here. The best albums have this consistency: vision, aesthetic, music and lyrics united, and the concept is both critical and creative, wielding its destruction for higher powers. I don't find much of that here, and it makes it hard to want to pierce the surface tension of these albums when I know that inside is mixed in the attention put into it.