Album Review: "Enslaved" by Murder Made God

Enslaved

What if the Headless Horseman's horse didn't have a head?

That would be chaos!

My favorite comedian, Mitch Hedberg spoke those lines, though not quite as PG as that, on his posthumous album Do You Believe In Gosh?

There's a man that left us too soon. There were still a great many things that Hedberg had yet to teach us.

And you know, what if Spiderman shot hammocks instead of spider webs? Let's move on a bit toward some brutal death metal though.

In Metal Evolution David Vincent of Morbid Angel described death metal as being a lot of notes, a lot of abrasion, and more. Host, Sam Dunn, talked about how extreme metal, to most people sounds just like noise. Both he and Vincent had a very clear idea why Death Metal wasn't as popular as say, Power Metal, but what about metal that's heavier than death metal?

Murder Made God

Death Metal has been described as the jazz of the metal world, but that's not too appropriate.

Brutal Death Metal is.

If Old School Death Metal (which this is now a cromulent term) is too much for most, what about this?

Imagine jazz at 400 BPM.

There you go. Now you're thinking brutal death metal.

To the uninitiated, this album is noise. Without an ear for metal, this album will sound more confusing than A Brief History On Time by Stephen Hawking. Much like physics, highly complex music is speaking a very different language than that of three chord rock'n'roll.

This album is frenetic in the mellow valleys of the songs. In the full on sections, it's not just riff after riff, but what if Tony Iommi was on meth during a songwriting session? It might come out a bit like this.

But the chaos is only a facade. The songs are as strong as the vocals. The roaring demonic voice didn't sound like a single death rattle, but of a man possessed. Even the most unfamiliar death metal fan would recognize there are words involved and that's the minimum for this author.

For this case, the blast beat drum triggers will be forgiven because they were played along with the guitars in such a masterful way.

When life is spinning and there's no control, this is an album that centers the listener, because it teaches you to control the chaos and spin it the way you want.

Release: 4/15/16
Genre: Brutal Death Metal
Label: Comatose Records
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