When a band
chooses a name as badass as Fleshgod Apocalypse
it creates a lot of expectations about its musical output. I am not
disappointed!
Fellow reviewers from other sites has labelled the style of Fleshgod as
"hyperspeed Death Metal", and I can't come up
with a better term myself. This is not only fast, it's mind-numbingly ultra-violent and
furious, but structured with military precision. If I were to make a video for
the opening track of this EP ("Thru Our Scars")
it would consist mainly of those scary recordings from the first Gulf War - you
know, those filmed from Lockheeds as the
missiles hit home.
Aside from the insane tempo Fleshgod
excels in a number of ways. The animalistic growls
of Tommaso Riccardi is
seconded by bassist Paolo Rossis clean
"operatic" vocals in some of the songs. The use of distorted classical strings
and eerie samples, as a way of binding the songs
together, places Mafia a bit outside the 100% brutal Death Metal of Fleshgod's demos
and only full-length, Oracles (2009). These
additions to an otherwise single-minded genre
are not in any way dominant - one actually hardly notice them - but this release
would have been quite something else (and perhaps a little boring) without them.
One strange feature - and perhaps annoying, for some of you diehard Death
Metal aficionados - is the title track Mafia,
which is a 3 minutes long pure piano piece. It is the last song of five, and in
my opinion it fits in with the four manic explosions that comes before it - if
only as a way to slowly return to the real world after being solidly ear-raped
for 20 minutes.
