Internal Bleeding

The Extinction Of Benevolence

(c)(p)1997 Pavement Music Inc.

Review by Neil St.Laurent

Often a rarity in the genre is a quite subtle introduction, which in the case of "The Extinction..." offers nothing more than a pause before the assault starts.

"The Extinction..." has a fairly standard song structure, go with the slower driving guitar riff for a while, then break out into short segments of total cacophonous assaults. The guitar tracks are monotonous and at times very close to being only a single repeated sound. The lacklustre performance of the guitars however could in part be attribute to very bad engineering on the production, if you listen hard enough at least one guitar has some interesting variance, but its range has been supressed so much in the mix it doesn't really seem to do anything.

It is very difficult to review by-the-book death metal. It has all of the requisites in forms of riffs, blast beats, excessive low end, often broken song melodies, etc... On top of all of it is the standard throaty growling.

Many possibly enjoyable components can be heard, unfortunately the music is weak and often the work on one member is independant of that of another.

You often have to wonder how the vocalist can remember extremely long lyrics, especially the ones with little musical quality to them. The lyrics on this album are fairly long, but they don't all have too much value to them. It is fine and all to try and use poetic techniques, but phrases such as "Heralds of pestilence" and "Vanquishers of death" don't really have a coherent or logical meaning. They writers are simply trying too hard to have lyrics with gripping brutality, but instead end up with somewhat flat and uninspired results.

Everybody could use a little more thoughtless old school death metal in their collection, but I wouldn't recommend going with Internal Bleeding.

Internal Bleeding is:
Frank Rini: Vocals
Bill Tolley: Drums
Chris Pervelis: Guitar
Brain Hobbie: Bass
Anthony Miola: Guitar

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