### Loathe: Despondent by design

#### 17/08/10 || Khlysty

Loath comes from Malta –of all places!!!- and plays what I consider to be a pretty streamlined version of death metal, with some thrashisms thrown in for good measure. I have to admit here and now that, from all the records send to GD for reviewing, that ended up on my lap, this “Impotent By Design” shit (pretty obvious joke, so I shan’t use it any more…) is pretty good. How good? Well, it doesn’t exactly bother me, neither does it make me want to erase it from my hard disk as soon as I finish the obligatory three spins for the review. But, is it really good?

No. To start with the bad shit, the vocals and especially the Gollum-raspy-sore-throat ones, are hideous, if not laughably so, while the death grunts are serviceable at best. Also, while the production suffers from the usual trappings of death metal (compression), this time around it seems to also lack seriously on the bottom-end front, thus stealing the songs of any serious punch. And, guys, do you know what fucking editing means? It means that sometimes –in this case, most of the time- you know when to trim your songs (from thirty seconds to one minutes, in my opinion), so as to make their impact seriouser, y’know? These songs aren’t exactly Opeth or Neurosis stuff, so being a little shorter wouldn’ta hurt one bit.

Now, as I said before, this shit is not really bad. The songs seem to avoid all kinds of the excess that generally plagues death metal nowadays. Here, you won’t find convoluted and ultimately obsolete song structures. You won’t find guitar wankery. You won’t find any kind of –core in the music. Actually, and this is what makes me pretty sympathetic towards them guys, every song seems to have been composed with the sole purpose of grooving, moshing out, headbanging and generally having a good time. And, even if the lasting value of these songs, or, for that matter, of the whole record, seems to be pretty low (I think that you won’t consider them as prerequisite listen in the years to come), one could do worse that giving Loathe a chance. Know what I mean?…

- Information
- Released: 2010
- Label: Self-released
- Website: www.loatheonline.com
- Band
- Beast: vocals
- Kurt: guitars
- Karl: guitars
- Mark: bass
- Alan: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Hellfire
- 02. As cold as they come
- 03. November
- 04. The Devil’s playground
- 05. Black light
- 06. Children of a lesser god
- 07. This respect
- 08. This overwhelming grasp of solitude
- 09. The dark diaries
- 10. The end of all things good