DIVINE HERESY - review added 30th July 2009
Album Review: Bringer Of Plagues (2009)
For fans of: Metalcore... and NOISE!
Divine Heresy is a project featuring Fear Factory's legendary guitarist Dino Cazares. The present status of Fear Factory seems uncertain with legal wranglings and rumours of new albums circulating. Shame. They produced some genre-defining stuff, notably 1995's Demanufacture with it's tight industrial heaviness and speed-driven combat-rhythms.
Completing the Divine Heresy line-up is Travis Neal on vocals, Joe Payne on bass guitar and Tim Yeung on drums. The sweetly titled Bringer Of Plagues follows 2007's even more delightfully titled Bleed The Fifth. This is the group's 2nd album and the first to feature Travis and Joe.
The sound is akin to a train wreck between Fear Factory and Killswitch Engage, with Killswitch Engage coming off a lot worse. It's basically metalcore done in the Fear Factory style. It's not quite industrial, but rapid-fire drum beats, lightning-quick guitars and guttural vocals dominate the record. For the majority of the time you'd be hard pressed to describe this as music. Bringer Of Plagues is mostly über-fast noise overlaid on top of phat kicks. The album has it's moments of melodious prowess, but they are rare and separated by vast swathes of cut-and-paste sameness.
Fear Factory were incredibly heavy and fast, but there were melodies built into the violence you could enjoy on several levels. They also weren't afraid to slow it right down when needed. Divine Heresy, on this evidence at least, can only be enjoyed on one level. If you don't like intricately technical broken beats and guitars thrashed to within an inch of death there really is no point listening to this.
Good songs? The title track has a few sections you could describe as pleasant. When Travis sings cleanly on 'Redefine' it almost all comes together. He has a strangled T-Rex of a voice that sounds kind of cool. Sadly he spends too much time growling and screaming to give anyone chance to appreciate his work.
'Monolithic Doomsday Devices' approaches the world of catchiness, but it's still too busy to be truly great. 'Darkness Embedded' is by far and away the best track on the album. Everything is reined in and the end result is soooooo much better. Travis sings rather than shouts, the guitars are heavy rather than stupidly quick and the drums don't sound like a minigun. It's still a brutal song by most accounts, but it's brutal in a nice sort of way - like running over a half dead animal in the road to put it out of its misery.
There are plenty of albums that are considerably heavier than this that still manage to be musical. Why Divine Heresy chose to produce such a big bag of noise I don't know. Yes, there are a limited number of cool interludes, but they are drowned by a flood of over exuberant cack. Playing this album is like listening to someone shaking a can full of ball bearings through a 10,000 watt Marshall stack. These guys are better than this. Much better.
Check out... 'Darkness Embedded', or preferably a proper Fear Factory album.
Track List:
1. Facebreaker
2. Battle of J. Casey
3. Undivine Prophecies (Intro)
4. Bringer of Plagues
5. Redefine
6. Anarchaos
7. Monolithic Doomsday Devices
8. Letter to Mother
9. Enemy Kill
10. Darkness Embedded
11. End Begins
Artist's website(s): MySpace
