Dethcentrik - I Think You Got The Clean Version

Having never heard Dethcentrik before, I've had to come at this "album" with no preconceptions about who they are or what they claim to do. So I'm purely going to comment on the "music", if you could call it that...

At seven tracks, the first being a rather boring, short intro track of a stretched sample, I'm not quite sure that 'I Think You Got The Clean Version' deserves to be called an album. It's more of an EP. They call themselves industrial metal but I have to assert that there is little more than drone music going on here; distorted, low-fi and really quite boring.

The thing that strikes me about this album is that it seems like the kind of thing you'd find to be eventually associated with the perpetrator of some large scale mass shooting, hidden away on some private webpage in a .zip file eventually to be found by the kids on 4chan's /b/ board and laughed at for how pathetic it is. It really reeks of low quality, poorly thought out teenage angst painfully squeezed through a distortion plugin.

"Scapes of the Real" is the most bearable of the songs, if one can say such a thing about this album, having somewhat a more industrial feel with sampled drums, synths and horror/sci-fi style ambience. It's still pretty uneventful and repetitive yet compared to the rest of this album, it felt like a brief moment of rest from the aural raping you are undergoing, like being under the shade of a withering tree in the middle of the Sahara desert - you're still dehydrating to death, but you appreciate the couple of minutes respite it provides.

Taking a sample of a metal drum being hit and stretching it out over three minutes at various pitches does not a song make. "Realization of Being In Hell"? Hell seems like a much more inviting idea than having to listen to this rubbish on loop. (Come to think of it, they'll probably read this and take that as a compliment. Damn.) The song contains the words "Sometimes I feel like God hates me..." Well it doesn't take a genius to tell these guys why that might be the case.

The lyrical content is sparse, mostly being spoken word samples or painfully embarrassing growling (distorted, of course). In "We Are Slaves to Machines", someone growls "Mankind is enslaved to their machines!" just once in the whole song. The eloquently titled "I Want To Kill Them All" contains nuggets of lyrical mastery like, "I want to kill them all, I want them to suffer! Their pain gives me pleasure!" I'm pretty sure these guys take pleasure in the pain they put through anyone who has the misfortune to have their poor ears exposed to this torturous sludge.

This whole release leaves me rather bemused as to what the creators think they were doing by making it. I can't even really give them an A for effort, it's just so poorly thought out and executed from start to finish, and a solid example for why bigger labels are still useful in this scene, acting as quality control against this sort of self-important nonsense. Aug 13 2012