SIX FEET UNDER REACH LOWS MUCH DEEPER THAN SIX FEET
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 2:59pm by Sammy O'Hagar
I love death metal; I would just like to make that abundantly clear. I love the old school tenacity of Deicide and Morbid Angel. I love the old-school-with-a-twist tenacity of Suffocation and Immolation. I love the sneering but melodically juicy bits of At the Gates, Carcass, Entombed, Arsis and the Crown. I love (LOVE!) old Cryptopsy. Hell, I love everything Cryptopsy did up to this year. I love the subtle virtuoso intensity and devastating slams of Dying Fetus. I love the decidedly non-subtle virtuoso intensity of Necrophagist, Decapitated, and Psycroptic. I love the outside-the-box thinking death metallers like Nile, Vital Remains, and Portal (though I understandably spend a lot of time defending the latter). I love other death metal bands and sub-genres (along with sub-genres of sub-genres) I’m probably forgetting. It is with this love that I say that Death Rituals, the latest album by Six Feet Under, is a fucking abomination. It taps into everything that makes for bad, bad death metal to an extent where if it were a hair worse, it would be a war crime. But instead, it’s just bad. Even shameful. A cancerous mole on the ass of death metal. Simplicity is one thing, good sirs; an apparent lack of any sort of effort is another.
I suppose Six Feet Under’s chief sin is sloppiness. And sloppiness can be a good thing (the aforementioned Portal certainly uses it to their advantage); I am by no means arguing that all death metal has to be razor precise in composition and execution. But all of Death Rituals – fuck, down to the name of the fucking album – feels like a series of half-thought out ideas and lazy performance. The album doesn’t rise above a midpaced tempo often, and when it does, it sounds like the aural equivalent of a fat man running: the music seems to lag behind the speed it’s actually aspiring to, perpetually shouting, “Come on, man! Wait up!” I call Six Feet Under “lazy” instead of, you know, “bad,” because with a handful of tremolo picked riffs and interesting drum fills, the musicians seem to hint that they can do more. Instead, they hang back with an unending array of simplistic and cliché death metal riffs played at an uninteresting tempo: not fast enough to boil your blood (or overshadow the stock-ness of the riffery), not slow enough to get your head nodding. This has all been done before, and done much, much better.
Of course, no Six Feet Under review can go without mention of vocalist/death metal icon Chris Barnes. Though the man is undeniably one of the pillars on which death metal rests, he’s the element of Six Feet Under that holds back the band most consistently. Though not all – hell, not many – can maintain a consistent growl after years of death grunts, Barnes sounds like a wounded version of his former self. Phil Anselmo is a great, great example of a vocalist that decreased his range over the years via a cocktail of wear-and-tear and weed and booze that has managed to work within his growingly limited parameters. His vocals, though no longer capable of reaching the nuts-in-a-vice highs of Cowboys from Hell, now have a grisly tone of world weariness to them, working as an extension of the soulful-yet-demonic croon made famous by Sabbath-era Ozzy. Barnes sounds like he’s using the same technique he was using for Tomb of the Mutilated. And while the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it argument works for a great many bands – especially in metal – shit’s broke here. And without fixing, Barnes sounds like a twenty year old cat caught in a rusty rider lawnmower.
Most of all, the biggest problem with Death Rituals is that it’s just not good, down to its very DNA: the songs are BAD. They lack any sort of coherence, with parts often sounding like they’re slapped together, possibly at random. Take the abominable attempt at death ’n’ roll that is “Bastard”: the song starts off with a bizarre, flanged drum fill, followed by a slower-than-average few seconds of grind, followed by three minutes of criminally boring throwback metal guitars (with, admittedly, a passable solo in the middle) backed by an uncomfortably stiff AC/DC beat, then confusingly closed out by staccato chords, coming from a different song or record altogether, as far as “Bastard” is concerned. There’s no excuse for death metal this sloppy to be notable or receive the amount of attention Death Rituals will receive. Even if this record was made by Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth, Cannibal Corpse’s Alex Webster, Destroy the Opposition-era drumming from ex-Dying Fetus stickman Kevin Talley, and Chris Barnes, it would still be unforgivable. There is much better death metal out there; plumb through the depths and find some there. Certainly it will be more worth your time than the 45-plus minutes of Death Rituals.
(1 out of 5 horns)
-SO
One thing I love about this site. You guys are complete fanboys to some bands, yet you are absolutely relentless in your negative reviews of shitty albums. There’s no need to make an album sound better than it is.
At least the production is better on this one.
you do realize Bastard is a cover of a Motley Crue song.
i’ve got the album. you’re right.
Six Feet Under have created a few abominations:
Covering the entirety of AC/DC’s Back in Black album in studio, creating possibly the most pointless album of all time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aep-u0-CUSc
Going one worse than Ice-T’s guest rap on Black Sabbath’s Forbidden album, and creating the unholy abomination of brutal death-rap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3jJtcQbG0U
Actually, that Sabbath song isn’t too bad.
Ugh. Sloppy, shitty band. Calling this death metal is an insult to actual death metal bands.
chris barnes’ voice is completey shot
with more than 15 albums made, i would think it might be hard to make a new album and have everybody expect its going to break the barriers of metal. gotta give them a little credit. Smokin weed all day and drinking, to me is way more metal than sitting at your computer all day playing world of warcraft like George Fisher(cannibal corspe).
Damn, I had such high-hopes for this one! I thought SFU were gonna make a life-changing record this time around…
Sammy: You should check out ColdWorker and Burning The Masses definitely some good death metal. One really good reason to check out Coldworker: ex members of Nasum. Oh, and I wouldn’t really consider At The Gates death metal, more thrash.
this review is spot on! Im old dm/cannibalcorpse/SFU fan and this deffinetly sucks hard.
That’s why I never listen to critics, the review & the reviewer are so full of shit it’s not even funny.
Chris Barnes sucks anyway.
I used to never listen to critics, but this isn’t “Pitchfork media”.
I checked it out and I see exactly what Sammy meant. This is rubbish.
SFU have sucked for years. They’re like a parody band now. I really can’t take them seriously anymore.
Yes, Barnes’ voice is shot and old, but weed and drinking will do that. Not an excuse though.
I listened to a Sotajumala record and then Death Rituals and it was like night and day. Not even in the same league. I had high hopes for this one too. I read somewhere that the new guitarist was supposed to have breathed new life into the band. That he wasn’t a liability anymore. Uh, no. It still sucks.
There is so much more better DM than this.
It’s rarely a good idea for ANY band to release an album of new material only 1 year after making a really good one. 2007’s COMMANDMENT was an excellent SFU album IMO: the rhythms were there, the gruesomely funny lyrics were there, the riffs were there. DEATH RITUALS only rarely achieves the same level that that one did. You want some GOOD SFU? Then check out Commandment, 13, or Maximum Violence.
ARE YOU SERIOUS?!? Commandment and 13 were absolute garbage too. Good Six Feet Under would be their first two albums with Alan West. Human Target, The Enemy Inside, Revenge of the Zombie, 4:20, Manipulation, those songs are a lot better than the SFU of the last 6-7 years.
Good album. Any true sfu fan would shut the fuck up and listen. Its biker death metal you idiots. Whoever writes these reviews is a fucking idiot who knows nothing and is trying to sound experienced and professional. In actuality the sad person knows nothing about music.
maybe SFU secretly knows most metalheads are idiots and will buy any piece of shit, so they make a piece of shit and can live off it. I mean, look at all the assholes that brought the new slayer or pretty much any metalcore[god forbid, killswitch, etc] and were bored with it in a week and realized they wasted 16 bucks…if only, right?
yeah this coming from someone who likes iwrestleedabear once, maybe if you could make money off them like the other garbage bands you promote we’d see a better review. and doubt you gave this album serious consideration b/c you didnt even know bastard was a cover. in closing…go suck god forbids johnsons
they already are
i like this band because of their “sloppiness” and the siplistic, but catchy (in my humble opinion) riffs. I dont feel the need to compare Barnes current work with his older. to me hes just another death metal dude