Ingested - Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering

January 8, 2010

Reviewer: Matt

I admit I feel a little guilty giving a bad review to a band with their heart clearly in the right place and who display some true instrumental proficiency, but Ingested really isn’t very good.  While Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering leans closer to slam death than deathcore, it’s most likely fans are those who spinning Job for a Cowboy than those who got into death metal via the classics.

Ingested, a rising star in the UK death metal scene, come up short because their songwriting is entirely too simplistic.  Where Origin reduced and simplified Disgorge and Devourment, Ingested simplify Origin’s “brutal death metal” and throw in Suffocation-style breakdowns.  And that’s really all there is to Surpassing.  The songs are predictable to anyone who’s heard five death metal albums in their life, merely alternating between fast sections and slow sections, transitioning among riffs almost exclusively by dropping out the drums and laying down a few staggered, chugging cords.  Ingested clearly have down the basics of “death metal” distilled to its most obvious concepts and typical techniques, but there’s a startling lack of cohesion within songs, making it apparent that they lack even a rudimentary understanding of how riffs can interrelate.  It’s death metal for listeners with no attention span: each song is basically a random assembly of unrelated riffs with no rhythmic interplay among instruments and no coherent compositional direction.  Most problematically, devices such as breakdowns and pinch harmonics are overused to the point where they’re simply annoying and tedious rather than devastating.

Topping it off is a misguided “modern” production.  The vocals sound fine and the guitars have a pretty hefty tone, but the bass is largely excluded from the mix, a strange choice considering the resources evidently available.  The drums, predictably, are triggered and mixed too highly; they’re like sound effects from Call of Duty and are unrepentantly overbearing.

I guess if your bar for good death metal is fairly low then you’re expectations won’t be high enough to warrant disappointment.  There’s a lot of hype going around about the UK death metal scene, but I’m not impressed.  There’s too much emphasis on breakdowns, simple and repetitive riffs, and formulaic songwriting.  There’s too much good death metal out there for me to recommend you spend money on this.  Ingested have their work cut out for them if they want to be any more than a free download.

Release Date: June 22nd, 2009
Label: Candlelight/Siege of
Amida Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Skinned and Fucked
2.  Contorted Perception
3.  Copremesis
4.  Intercranial Semen Injection
5.  Stillborn
6.  Pre-Released Foetal Mush
7.  Cremated Existence
8.  Condemned to Rape
9.  Anal Evisceration

Total playing time: 33:18

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