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Necrodeath – Singin’ In The Pain

necrodeath – singin’ in the pain

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We’re writing early 2023 and I think we already have a strong contender for the corniest album title of the year. Seriously, what were they thinking? Most painful to this whole matter is that we’re not dealing with Cannabis Corpse or Cliteater, but with one of Italy’s longest running extreme metal band Necrodeath. Okay, the band’s history is not totally free of so-called tongue-in-cheek sort of humour, but this really takes the cake. Yet, the music is what matters most, of course. So, let’s go and dive in this 13th full-length of the Black/Thrash Metal veterans.

Admitted, I can’t really shake off the rather foul taste of the album title completely. Not even with the album being some sort of a concept album for Stan Kubrick’s great ‘A Clockwork Orange’ movies. Musically it is not all that bad, but not quite convincing either. Though I must admit that I kind of liked the band’s earlier post-hiatus albums, as can be read elsewhere on VM-Underground, but on hindsight it sounds all pretty much in the same sort of unsatisfyingly way. It may not do a band justice to keep comparing them to their classic material from the 80’s, but it is, on the other hand, fairly unavoidable. Especially when the early recordings have such a completely different sound, atmosphere and overall aesthetic. You also shouldn’t expect a band to stay stuck in their primal sound of their earliest days, after all times change and so do production possibilities and obviously musicians will also master their instruments better.

But listening to ‘Singin’ In The Pain’, or any of the band’s albums of the past, let’s say, two decades, it feels like we’re dealing with a completely different band than that who wrote and recorded ‘Into The Macabre’ in 1987. Ah, well, that was a bit of my personal nostalgic mood taking over, but, that being said, even to today’s standards Necrodeath isn’t able to fully compete with current Black/Thrash Metal bands. Not in terms of catchy song writing, riff-wise, but certainly not in the sense of aggression and the genre’s sharp edged violence. Necrodeath’s faster sections do sound rather dry and free of anything lethal or otherwise imposing. The very same thing could be said about the riffs and the vocals, not as snappy or sharp as you would love to hear them.

I think it is fair to say that Necrodeath has long been surpassed by countless of bands, who, in fact, ironically might cite the Italians as one of their influences. Though it is not a real punishment to sit through a random Necrodeath album recorded in those aforementioned last twenty years, and you might even call the majority of them quite solid, the overall experience remains just average at best. Not even the best of the ‘A Clockwork Orange’ samples is saving it from its ordinariness, in fact, if I would like to hear the “I know the law, you bastards!”-sample, I’d rather turn to The Exploited.