PESTILENCE - Resurrection Macabre
Did you ever wonder what would happen if you streamlined the dry production of PESTILENCE's Testimony of the Ancients to meet modern standards, and kicked around substandard versions of some of the band's backcatalog riffs into mind-numbing ABABCAB cut-and-paste architecture?
No?
What if the illiterate jazz was jammed in every song in the form of the guitar solo?
To give you an idea how unfathomably unimaginative this album is, the vocals on the first two songs begin by repeating their respective, inane two-word titles immediately after the opening riff. In fact, this happens on no fewer than five out of the eleven tracks on the album. Nary a song passes without hammering the one- or two-word song title home as chorus in some manner; the bafflingly sophomoric lyricism is merely occasionally deferred. The vocal delivery is so dispassionate that it persuades you they know exactly the kind of boilerplate tripe they are spewing.
Maybe even more convincingly braindead: they've introduced a sequel to a song in Dehydrated II (how does that happen a second time?). They've cleverly lifted the opening riff from the original track and inverted the melody in order to buy themselves another three minutes (inverted old-timey riff, chorus riff, inverted old-timey riff...etc.) Unfortunately, they've also revealed their entire comeback formula by failing to come up with only one more cliché title. Just another testament to the pervasive laziness of this entire affair, and revealing of the pathetic scheme they are implementing in trying to sucker in the most ancient of the longtime fans. Without that motive, it is nearly incomprehensible that a band would return from a giant sabbatical to cobble together this rubbish. However, this is, after all, Patrick Mameli's brainchild: a mediocre death metal mind in the first place, a childish anti-genre bloviator when it suited him, and now a forty-something slave to misguided nostalgia and his lost young adulthood, seeking the meager attention of others like him, i.e. the old, bored and standardless.
I spent an agonizing ten minutes with this piece of abject trash and could not bring myself to endure a single complete track. Thankfully, the three "bonus track" (oh boy!) re-recordings (of Martin van Drunen-led songs, of course) will be left forever off-limits to these ears because of it, lest the last of my youthful enthusiasm be dried up along with this terrible shell of a band.
These "comebacks" are beyond pathetic and beyond insulting.