Dysfunction is a function!
Canada’s Beneath The Massacre lined up their deal with Prosthetic Records on the back of their five track EP from 2005, titled Evidence of Inequity (on Galy Records). Not bad eh? This four piece, who are vocalist Elliot Desgagnés, guitarist Christopher Bradley, bassist Dennis Bradley and drummer Justin Rousselle, have a style strongly rooted in technical, extreme death metal, a-la Suffocation, Decapitated, Psycroptic which already has them in good company.
There’s precious little time wasted as Beneath the Massacre launch almost instantly into the opening cut, The Surface, with a flurry of blasting drums and frantic fret work. Its relentless sub three minute assault that feels as if it’s all over in a blink of an eye. Thankfully, there’s some variety contained within the album with the slower tempos of the likes of Society’s Disposable Son, The Stench of Misery, The Invisible Hand, and Better Off Dead working well from a song dynamics point of view. In addition to that, the furious fret work that Bradley unleashes from one end of the neck to the other throughout only enhances the balance between aggression and fluidity, the latter of which is aided by some tasteful, syncopated grooves.
The flip side of the Beneath the Massacre coin is the relentless aggression that they belt out. Think Decapitated meets Deicide meets Suffocation, Neuraxis, Psycroptic, and the like and that gives you some idea of what to expect. The System’s Failure, Long Forgotten and Sleepless are all students of that school of metal with no end of barraging, machine gun like drums and frantic riffage that manages to lose its impact when fused back to back as the last two of those tracks are. The final delivery of variety comes in the form of the instrumental track, titled Untitled, that, after around 30 seconds of industrial noise effect shifts into a slow Fear Factory like meshing of guitars, bass and drums, fails to transition seamlessly to Modern Age Slavery, a stand out track thanks to the invasive harmonics that appear at disjoint times throughout.
From a pure fury point of view, Beneath the Massacre, are up there on that scale without a doubt. But if it wasn’t for the slower more dynamic passages that they’ve inserted on Mechanics of Dysfunction, it would become a little too much of the same, and at times, it still does. But for a first effort, the potential is there and with some refinement, they should find themselves amongst the ranks of Decapitated et al without question. Time will tell.
(Prosthetic Records)
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