Anima, Enter The Killzone
As many of you know, I’m one of the few people writing for this site willing to give some positive attention to deathcore. With forthcoming albums from Oceano and Rose Funeral still on the horizon in 2010, I thought I might get my quick fix of pig squeals and breakdowns from this, the sophomore album from Anima on Metal Blade. Regrettably, Enter The Killzone sounds like a copy-and-paste job lacking any serious effort to actually write songs, all the more astounding given death metal’s already low threshold. Here you’ll find all the familiar deathcore markers, ticked off as if on a checklist. The triggered drums grate on my patience even more than my ears, and the guitarist proves incapable of crafting a half-decent breakdown. The song titles–”Cu(n)t & Twist” and “The Omnipotent Torture King”, for example–frequently rely on torture porn schlock, another testament to Anima’s complete and utter lack of creativity. “XXXIII”, an apparent attempt at a Winds Of Plague epic, kicks off like the score of a Vincent Price B-movie and gets even worse from there. By deathcore standards, this is a remarkably piss poor showing.

(1 out of 5 horns)

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I recently ran into a guy with whom I used to hang in High School back in the Eighties. We were both really into Metal and as the decade progressed our tastes kept leaning heavier. He got me into a little-known band that actually recorded under the name “Death” (“Dude! The album’s called “Scream Bloody Gore” – you’re going to LOVE this!) and I introduced him to a new act called Obituary that I believed would never be bested as far as heaviness and brutality were concerned (two decades later I still cling to that observation).

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