Disfiguring The Goddess - Sleeper (Review)

"And I thought Circle of Nine Was Bad"

Well, well, well… what do have here? Disfiguring the Goddess is back again only a year after releasing their disastrous album, Circle of Nine. The Sleeper EP is one EP that I’ve been waiting on the sidelines for, wondering to myself “will this make or break Disfiguring the Goddess?” because I loved their debut self titled album and all the demos and promos they’ve released prior to it. However, I’ve already mentioned that Circle of Nine was a complete and utter disaster. It is literally the worst thing I’ve heard. But, my hope and the hype fell miserably short to what I was truly expecting from Disfiguring the Goddess. I was really hoping that Disfiguring the Goddess would go back to their old form, which was; brutal, heavy, guttural and intense. However, I think its official that they’ve ditched everything that their older fans loved, for absolute shit (and when I mean absolute shit… I MEAN, ABSOLUTE SHIT!). This ship floated, hit an iceberg, and then sunk… now there is nothing left to salvage.

First of all, I must point out to everyone that this is NOT and I repeat, NOT, slamming or brutal at all. I’m sick of reading comments made about “OMG, this is ttly SlaMing and Hevy!” because the fact is, it’s not. All the components and elements that you’d typically expect from a normal slamming death metal band are as follows; heaviness, brutality (obviously), darkness and of course abrasiveness. There is and absence of any of those elements in the Sleeper EP, and if they actually existed (which is something I highly doubt), I’m definitely having trouble hearing it. Ok, sure, there may be some few “moments” of slamming brutality but a few moments does not equate to the entire EP or band being brutal. It’s like saying that We Butter the Bread With Butter is pure screamo, because of the track “Superföhn Bananendate”, or saying that Whitechapel is progressive deathcore because of some of the “moments” in the track “The Somatic Defilement”. It’s illogical, and wouldn’t make sense to any sane individual. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, let me put their music into perspective by breaking up the components of their sound and re-building them.The first step is to obtain djent and progressive technical metalcore song structures and guitar riffs. The second step is to deepen the tone of the guitars and add a little bit of extra distortion. The third step is to throw in some drumming, but not just any drumming… wait, scratch that, any drumming would do. Step four is to add some random synthetic sounds that have absolutely nothing to and completely unrelated to the rest of the music. Now all you have to do is make a cover and flip to a random page in the dictionary and place your finger anywhere on that page and there’s the EP title! Hey presto! You’ve just made the Sleeper EP (Sleeper? What the fuck, seriously?). Now I bet you’re probably thinking “but you forgot the slams and brutality”, don’t you mean… Disfiguring the Goddess have forgotten the slams and brutality? C’mon, let’s be reasonable, apart from the very few faint traces throughout Sleeper, Disfiguring the Goddess is not brutal death metal at all.

Oh no, NOT THE SYNTHETICS AGAIN! There was one thing that I just couldn’t stand about Circle of Nine, and that was the synthetics. Those keyboards and other computer generated sounds were so annoying! Not only are the synthetics back, but Disfiguring the Goddess have brought them to the forefront of their music. Yep, all those chimes, harps, choir and other randomly generated sounds are littered in random spots throughout Sleeper (25 Achievement Points if You Spot Them All!) and they are much worse than before. The one thing that I could possibly say about Circle of Nine is that they didn’t go overkill on the synthetics, but then again, there shouldn’t, really be any synthetics anywhere in brutal death metal. However in Sleeper, they are more than over-used and have little to no direction to them which gets me to ask: why are they there in the first place? because they aren’t contributing to the overall music quality. I believe that the synthetics are the worst part of The Sleeper, namely because they brought back that annoying choir keyboard sounds which drive me up the fucking wall. There is one point in the track “Queen Kingdom” where there is nothing but the choir keyboards playing which is without a doubt, the most annoying, most retarded and worst part of the EP. You could not believe how much I needed to pour a bottle of bleach in my ear canals just to not hear this. I know this is brutal death metal and all, but I should get happy angry when I listen to this, not angry angry… which is what is happening to me now. 

To be perfectly honest, I don’t give a flying fuck stick about whether or not Cameron (the original founder of Disfiguring the Goddess) also specialises in making electronic music. Ok, I respect that he may, perhaps be good at making electronic dance music and he is also fucking good at creating pure brutal death/deathcore (as heard in Disfiguring the Goddess’s previous works) but he cannot cross the two together. I’m sure that there are means an ways of crossing the two together to make some brutal death metal that sounds a least half decent, however, Cameron just simply doesn’t posses those skills… now look what happened. 

It seems that the more I listen to The Sleeper, the more I wonder why I’ve actually bothered to listen to it, or better yet, why I bothered to continue listening to this EP after the very first track. I know that deathcore and brutal death metal have the reputation of being really redundant and loopy genres, but at least other bands have some kind of variation to their sound. Unlike Disfiguring the Goddess, because on Sleeper, all you need to do is listen to the first track and you’ve heard it all. All the vocals, all the riffs, all the synths and all their retardedness can be experienced in a single track. Also, the way that the tracks are laid out in the EP makes no sense either. There is not intro or outro, or anything with leads up to a climax. In fact, I couldn’t even spot a climatic point in any of the tracks in Sleeper. This really disappointed me because, like in Circle of Nine, there were times where I could feel an extremely strong build up of tension to where I was expecting a heavy ass breakdown to come at the end. But time after time, they keep missing or ignoring those opportunities which tend to leave holes in the music. Holes which they have chosen to fill with silly out-of-place synthetics and other random shit.

What confuses me however, is why people continue to argue whether or not the vocalist inhales or exhales, but considering the fact that this is literally the worst excuse of death metal I’ve heard, why bother? because the vocals are the least of your worries. They only oscillate from extremely high pitch to extremely low pitch with no sense of depth or extra dimension. You know how you get that feeling when you know that a band has definitely used a drum machine to produce their music because it sounds awkwardly monotone and sterile. Well, that’s what the vocalist from Disfiguring the Goddess sounds like. So inhales, or exhales, it doesn’t count for shit either way.

Taking everything I’ve mentioned into account, I think I’ve firmly stated why I believe that this EP was obviously a rushed job and why Disfiguring the Goddess is now officially a skid mark on the underwear of brutal death and deathcore. To be fair, the only track that I thought that was listenable was “Daughter of Depths”. “Daughter of Depths” was actually heavy and sounded at least something like brutal death. Everything else, forget about it. I think I’ve thoroughly gone through the reasons why I think; Sleeper is NOT slamming death metal, Sleeper has terrible (and I mean terrible) synthetics and electronic elements and the sheer redundancy of the EP overall. There is very little scope and depth to Sleeper at all. If it wasn’t for the track “Daughter of Depths” I would probably say that Sleeper is worth maybe -1 or -2/20, but today I think it deserves a 1/20. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve lost all respect for Disfiguring the Goddess, and there is no way in hell that I’m going to be lining up to buy their upcoming album.

1/20

Disfiguring the Goddess - Circle of Nine

Disfiguring the Goddess - Circle of Nine

Circle of Nine is Disfiguring the Goddess’s 2011 release. Disfiguring the Goddess is a brutal deathcore band from the USA. Their last self titled album was one of the most promising brutal death/deathcore albums to hit the shelves. It had brutality, character, attitude and oomph. These guys have brought something to the deathcore scene that was unlike anything that was heard before, which is more closely related to brutal death metal than deathcore. That was in 2009, in 2011 Disfiguring the Goddess returned with Circle of Nine. Everything that was remembered, everything that was promised, everything that was hoped to be in this album for me was not present. There was nothing that reminded me or moved them forward from their previous releases. This had to be the biggest load of shit that was released in 2011 and the saddest thing is that people are still lining up for miles to get a hold of this album…why?

That is a question that left my mind as soon as I played this album, because this has to be the worst thing ever made. I mean there was nothing good that I could find about this album at all. The old Disfiguring the Goddess had some character and real power in their music which ultimately led to their success now this happens. It seems like everything was down tuned or made softer in this album. The guitars sounded like a strange harp with no vibe to it, before it actually had distortion and some thickness. The drumming is completely destroyed now, before the drumming was a nice fast pace and rhythm but now they sound like a chimp hitting a few empty ice cream containers. And I’m not even going to start with the vocals, they sound like someone with throat cancer trying to rap, I'm just going to leave it at that. It seems quite clear to me how much thought they have put into this album before they wrote it and the number I’m guessing is pretty close to zero. I mean, I have heard many albums where it seems like they haven’t planned anything and probably about 90% of those are much better than this shit.

Not only have the musician skills been thrown out the window, the atmosphere and everything has been thrown out as well. I don’t exactly know how to describe the atmosphere here, but some key words would be gloomy and dirty, and I also don’t mean that in a good way. They have made a failed attempt at creating a heavy atmosphere or heavy anything here. The breakdowns are so shitty as well, it really made me sad where at one point in the track Throne Of The Meek there was a build of tension which actually made be brace for the final explosion which I thought would have been an awesome breakdown, but, like everything else about this album it was shit. Also they have thrown in some weird sound affects throughout which are nothing but annoying. There is a part in Void Leacher where is sounds like a church choir singing “ohhhh yeahhh” over and over and over again and it just gets stuck in your head. It almost makes me angry, yes it is that bad.

So I have to ask why do people admire this album so much. I have read many other reviews talking about how everything is the same. Are they deaf? Absolutely nothing is the same, nothing, not a single thing can be salvaged from the wreckage. It almost seems like another band trying to make a cheap rip off of Disfiguring the Goddess and when this happens to a band, you know that sooner or later they are going to go belly up, I can almost see it right now. I’ve tried to get into this album as much as possible, and I’ve tried to looking for the things that reviewers and critics have liked about this album but there is just nothing, just nothing. In fact, the more I listen to this album, the more I dislike about it. I’m not even going to bother about recommending tracks for Circle of Nine because I think the most useful piece of advice I can give you is to revisit their 2009 self titled album, its infinitely times better than this album is. Circle of Nine is probably the worst thing to come out since the start of 2011 and the bottom line is that its overhyped and might even give you cancer if you listen to it too much. 1/20.