From: Phil.Powell@launchpad.unc.edu (Phil Powell)
Newsgroups: rec.music.christian,alt.rock-n-roll.metal,rec.music.industrial,rec.mag,alt.zines
Subject: SOAE Update
Date: 22 Dec 92 05:33:17 GMT
Organization: University of North Carolina Extended Bulletin Board Service


ALBUM REVIEWS (I said I would do it so here goes!):

Tourniquet, "Pathogenic Ocular Dissonance" (Intense)

What an incredible album! I cannot honestly get over it and won't for a
long time! This is Tourniquet's third release and by far their best! Gone
are the high-pitched King Diamond-style squeaky vocals of singer Guy
Ritter as he now goes lower and developing more power in his delivery. 
VERY VERY complex rhythmic flow persists and persists throughout each
tune, each radically different from the rest, and showing some of the most
diverse musical influences possibly in the history of heavy metal! For
example, "Exoskeletons" has a driving Megadeth-style rhythm to it (note
the Black Sabbath musical score at the end of the song), while the song
before it, "Incommensurate", sounds like a Metallica/Slayer/down-pitched
Carcass mix... and then there's "Phantom Limb", like mixing Al DeMeola's
jazzier lines with the Galactic Cowboys, and the title track, "Pathogenic
Ocular Dissonance" which goes from a heavy, slow deliberate drumbeat a la
mid-80s power metal to... grindcore, and that's just ONE SONG!  And to top
it all off, Tourniquet has once again fiddled with the medical dictionary
for these trippy song titles: "Impending Embolism"; "Ruminating
Virulence", "Spectrophobic Dementia" (they tuned this one tune to D!), the
title track, and the classic song title possibly of all time: "Gelatinous
Tuburcles of Purulent Ossification" (including a sampling of a Hero III
robot!)

Did I say get this album? Well, unless you're afraid of trying new and
mind-bending experiences, get this album while you still go to malls for a
purpose (i.e. before Christmas ends)...

Living Sacrifice, "Nonexistent" (R.E.X.)

I'll get this overwith: WHY WOULDN'T R.E.X. LET THEM HAVE SCOTT BURNS???
I'm sorry, Mr. Mann, you're good at producing alternative but leave the
death metal alone! Or get Scott Burns to do it, let him mix one of YOUR
RECORD LABEL'S BANDS right.

(The mail should be coming real soon on that comment alone! heh)

Aside from the weak production the album is undeniably awesome! It takes a
lot of getting used to, I mean, how many Christian death metal bands DO
you know? Very well-played, down to the staccato guitar picking and rhythm
variance (in short, it's not just one long grindcore beat).  For those of
you who were expecting Living Sacrifice to once again sound like Slayer,
well, in the words of Denis Leary: WRONG!!!! Serious and sincere mixes of
Entombed, Unleashed and Gorguts can be found in their tunes, and vocalist
DJ sounds much more frightening than before.. the remix of "Haven of
Blasphemy" is so different you wouldn't know they played that song years
before!  Another album you have to buy folks, I must say!

Under Midnight, "Under Midnight" (Wonderland/Epic)

This stuff is different! I mean, it took a lot of getting used to cuz at
times it'll be sincere heavy industrial with thick guitars (a la
Believer's Kurt Bachman), but then it'll lapse into a near-rave sounding
stuff that I cannot get into.  I wish they'd go rave or go brutal
industrial (like Godflesh), just make up your minds!  The entire album is
a concept album complete with printed libretto for you to read and follow
along a bizarre futuristic tale of 2 young people caught in a world
without God, trapped in "virtual reality" and "The Way"... cyberpunk
fanatics would most benefit from the exchange; the rest of humanity would
be completely confused until the end when they benefit from the desire of
the girl Jamie's heart to turn from "The Way" (the song "Yes I Am")..

Brutal bangers like myself will not enjoy this album completely, but
cyberpunksters just might. It's worth a try.


--

End of reviews

PS: For back issues of SOAE or Intermosh, anonymous FTP is available at
red.css.itd.umich.edu ...

Phil

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