I reviewed the 2008 four track EP from this brutal Italian lot in 2008, and I was pretty impressed by their performance at that time. I’ve listened to lots of death metal bands in the five or so years that I have been reviewing music, and many of them don’t ever get past the demo stage, and fewer again ever manage to record anything other than their first EP. It was always clear that Murder Therapy were going to be one of the rare outfits that were going to have some longevity. The essential question though remains, is that a good thing?
Well, on the basis of “Symmetry of Delirium”, that would be a resounding “yes”. Murder Therapy are a massively brutal death metal band with some stylistic similarities to the American brand of heaviness, albeit with more technicality than the instruction booklet for a 1980 Fergusson Videostar video recorder. To be frank, much of the technical aspects of the music here – the dizzying time changes, the dissonance and vertigo-inducing drum work speak to me more of sadly-defunct Polish outfit Yattering than more contemporary bands. That isn’t a bad thing, of course, when Murder Therapy’s brand of idiosyncratic metal insanity is at odds with the more straightforward flavours of brutality currently flooding the market by virtue of the asymmetrical hair brigade. Lyrically, Murder Therapy continue their fascination with insanity and fetishism, especially on the intriguing if controversial “Tales of The Bizarre”, which transposes Christ into a tale of sexual masochism. Just in time for Christmas too!
This isn’t an easy listening experience. That might seem like stating the bleeding obvious given that this is a technical death metal album, after all. It is, however, a rewarding listen if you are prepared to invest some time into getting beyond the initial impenetrable wall of noise and start delving into the intricacies of the labyrinthine song structures and Herculean feats of drumming. The production is adequate, if tending towards sterility – which oddly fits the rest of the music – aside from the vocalist, who is given free range to inject some insanity into his full throated raw to great effect. A difficult album, then, but one which rewards the patient consumer.
http://www.myspace.com/murdertherapy
