As reviewers, we give bad scores all the time. Rarely are we particularly heartbroken about it—so much music is releasing that, whenever I listen to a bad album, a good one is probably already around the corner. Still, I must admit that occasionally, a frustrating album lands on my operating table where, if the album were not covered in an unbreakable shell of bad elements, a good album could be hidden in it. Solace In Absurdity, I suspect, is such a case. BRUTALISM seem like they are committed to making quality brutal death metal. The band knows how to groove and how to construct riffs and manages to walk the tightrope between skronky technicality and groove with ease. Riffs have lots of harmonics and other indescribable guitar noises in them a lot of the time, injecting jagged rhythms with a sense of tonal contrast that other bands often lack. And when the band slams, I would be inclined to tap my toes and nod my head.
If it weren’t for the band’s unlistenable production. I can not know if the production choices are intentional, of course, but I would hope that a band so seemingly talented otherwise would not choose to ruin their own material in such a way that not only obfuscates its quality, but actively detracts from it. Solace in Absurdity has a uniquely bad production. While a lot of the production ends up being too tinny and feels awfully compressed, the soundscape still sounds muddy and undefined. Especially the production of the drums is egregiously messy, feeling more like a vaguely pulsating texture than anything with actual impact. I believe that the production of this album can be traced back to the recording process—the setup for the drum microphones was likely just plain wrong. Similarly, the wrong distance to the vocal mic when growling seems to have been chosen (or just a poor choice of microphone), as I can often hear breathing noises on the vocal track that add to the messy soundscape. I believe that at least a decent brutal death metal album is hidden here and I believe that BRUTALISM have the chops to make one in the future. Hopefully, they choose a more fitting production next time. Be it to eschew trends or just for a lack of recording expertise, this mix just doesn’t cut it.
