 Somewhere along the second song I came to the conclusion
that Cryptopsy now sounded like Chimera. I expected it to be a heartbreaker but
it wasn’t. It just made me shrug and say I knew this was coming. I mean this
was the band that had given me Blasphemy Made Flesh. One of the most face
ripping intense slabs of death metal ever. The band followed that up with None
So Vile, Whisper Supremacy and ….And Then You’ll Beg. These were albums that I
liked to varying degrees. Once Was Not sounded disjointed and messy and when
that song “Bemoan the Martyr” came out I braced myself for the coming
disappointment.
The album starts off ok. Worship Your Demons is short, sharp
and satisfyingly brutal. It’s got a nice punchy bass sound, it’s got groove and
it sounds interesting. After that though, the album goes Chimera. The death
metal moments are few and far between and not very good. I’m not sure what’s
happened here. A completely uncompromising band seems to have progressed musically
to a place where cliché and conformity are the order of the day. A musical
progression to more commercial realms.
Getting back to the music on offer, if the first three songs
were Chimera worship (and lets please give credit where it’s due), then with
“Bemoan The Martyr” the band introduce clean vocals and a keyboard. The
melodies sound like nu-metal rejects and the vocals like a cross between Linkin
Park and Nickleback. We’ve gone beyond bad now. We’re in the realm of sucking
very large rotten tomatoes. There’s a little bit of Swedish melody here and
there, lots of breakdowns, and mid paced chug. There’s a part in “The Plagued”
where the vocalist sings “today, I hope you realize, what we have, today , the
voice of a nation” like he’s got about half a dozen of Flo’s drum sticks up
his bung hole. It’s weak and sad and a bit embarrassing.
Another thing that really got to me after a while was the
drumming. It seemed so in my face that at times I felt like the guitars were being
buried by the drums. Around the eighth song it begins to sound tedious. I will
resist the temptation of a pun on Contemplating Regicide suffice to say that it
is yet more Chimera worship and maybe even a bit of Devildriver.
This is far too long a review for an album as dull, shallow
and tedious as The Unspoken King. It’s essentially a mish mash of The Great
Southern Trendkill, Chimera’s self titled album, bits of Swedish melody and an
incredibly cheesy sense of modern AOR.
There you have it. The new Cryptopsy. I should get a prize
for making the effort. This album gets a big fat zero.
Label - Century Media
Year of Release - 2008
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