Customer Reviews

Quantum Catastrophe

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Braindrill does it right. Ultrafast death metal, check. Killer production, check. Blast beats all over the place, check. Crazy psychotic guitar work, check. Indecipherable vocals, check.

It's all there. Crank it up and mangle your mind. This is over-the-top brutality. 5 stars.

Brain Drill really up the ante on technical death metal. If you like bands of the calibre of - Nile, Psycroptic or Cryptopsy you will love Quantum Catastrophe!

For those of you not knowing Braindrill play, they are a tech-death metal band. Not sure if this is better than Apocalyptic Feasting, but the production on this is better, even though the debut sounded awesome. The heavily triggered drums are there, coupled w/pretty much non stop blasting + you get the insanely fast gravity blasts on certain sections. The guitars have all the solos, sweeps, arpeggios that one could imagine. Some super fast bass lines as well. Steve, the singer, returns and his grunts/shrieks are perfect on here. Braindrill are so brutal and fast that sometimes the memorability factor on some of the songs blend together, but hell this is some way talented stuff that demands your attention and repeated listens. It is true that when they bust into a groove, which is rare, it does add a little more depth to the song. The title track is listed as 16 minutes. It is actually about 10 minutes and then 6 minutes of feedback/noise. This, so far this year, gets my vote for best cover of the year. People/cities getting sucked into the sky by some strange atomical vortex, all packaged in a slimline digipack for all us spacesavers. One of the years best!!!!!!

Ooooops!
I made a mistake (sorry Dylan). This cd is Ree Dick Cue Lus! With a new band backing him, Braindrill go in HARD and br00tal on this masterpiece. In my previous review (which I had a change of heart), I did go hard on them, comparing Quantam Catastrophe to Apocolyptic Feasting. BIG MISTAKE!!!!! Different sound, rhythm, beats, but still br00tal!

Music trends tend to move in threes; the 1960's saw The Beatles, The Rolling Stones & The Kinks: the 70's the Ramones, the Clash and the Sex Pistols: nu-metal had Slipknot, Limp Bizkit & Korn: now you have The Faceless, Beneath the Massacre & Brain Drill at the forefront of nu-tech death.

Unlike the first two groups of bands, and just like the last 3, there is absolutely no innovation in any 3 of the bands that teenagers, who don't know who WatchTower or Spiral Architect are, illogically seem to just absolutely love to death nowadays. There really is no sense of any kind of dedication to a lasting product, the trio are akin to eating a quarter pounder with fries while reading Stephen King novel; in the end none of it really extends any concept of a memorable experience. If anything, feelings of dread and a sense of wasted time prevail over anything.

These new bands are under the impression that if they can out-Cryptopsy ala the None So Vile days that they'll achieve some sort of enviable musical plateau. Brain Drill, unfortunately get nowhere near the peak of Cryptopsy's output, and they even manage to sink below Cryptopsy's lowest points (you know, the last 10 years or so.)

If something is not innovative it has to at least be memorable, and nothing on this album is; nothing, other than the severe mediocrity on display. Practically every song sounds the same, which is an oddity considering they're supposed to be a technical death metal band, and really if you took this album and put it under The Faceless or Trigger the Bloodshed and no one would be able to tell the difference. At the midway point I swore that if I heard one more idiotic squealing guitar, indicative of the fact that Dylan Ruskin has some sort of bestiality fetish, that I'd punch my cat; he now has massive brain damage. Ron Casey is a good enough drummer, but it is all for not really. He isn't doing anything particularly impressive or the least bit interesting, so he's really nothing more than a sub-par cog in a machine based in sterility. Steve Rathjen needs to go back to his job at Wal-Mart because he's really wasting everyone's time with his run of the mill vocals, doing his continuous best to sound as uber brutal as humanly possible.

There are no standout tracks, there is nothing to recommend about this album other than to stay away from it really. BUT, on a positive note, with the rise of these bands there also seems to be a revival in an interest in the old school death metal bands; you'd do well to take the left hand path and check out some OSDM instead, or at the very least Decrepit Birth.