Artist: Revilement
Title: Human Vivisection
Type: Album
Label: Thrash Hard Records

Never having heard of Revilement before I received Human Vivisection in for review, I took one look at the cover and prepared myself for an onslaught of extreme Grind, but appearances can be deceiving. Instead the Taiwanese five piece deliver a particularly brutal form of Death Metal on this, their first E.P., and whilst it doesn’t set the world alight, they sound like they just need to find a last spark to get a serious inferno going.

Joe Reviled’s vocal style is a pretty decent stab at a Glen Benton style demonic growl, with a slight undertone of a pig being sodomized. On first track ‘Human Vivisection’, after an opening onslaught of thunderous drumming interspersed with a standard but catchy guitar riff, Joe’s vocals cut in with an air of assured evil, and it is this that really grabs the attention and raises things above the average. There is plenty of groove here and variation, and Billy’s drums, although lacking in some much needed low end firepower, carry things along at a frenetic pace. The dual guitar attack of Da Pan and Xiao Zheng is showcased on ‘Perverse Malevolence’, as the sound falls upon you like an avalanche of brutality. The guitar solo towards the end though is rather weak and held together with a bizarre bouncy drum sound that makes it sound like the theme to a bizarre silent movie, like Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Goat Rapist’. On that note, ‘Raping The Comatose’ sounds good but clumsy, as if Deicide and Bloodbath got blindingly drunk and decided to jam together. Once again though, the belting vocals stand out and somehow hold things together, despite the annoying tinny drum sound, which here occasionally sounds like a biscuit tin being battered. Final track ‘Feeding A Mind Corrupted’ is a relentless beast and probably the most accomplished of the four, but vocals aside, as a package it just sounds like it needs more guts.

There’s not much here in the way of novelty or variation, but what they do, brutal death metal, they do very well, and in Joe Reviled, they have themselves a first class throat without question, but the rest of the guys could do with tightening up things just a bit. Whilst their inherent brutality is clear to see, they suffer here with a ropey production, but if they can just a little more effort spent on that front, it could turn these guys from simply good into bloody fearsome.

http://www.myspace.com/revilement

Lee Kimber

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