Dragged Into Sunlight - Hatred for Mankind (2009)^{Release ID: 3355}

The music is somehow worse than the album cover. Yes really!

Round 2: 

Wikipedia says
"The band consists of four balaclava-wearing individuals who perform with their backs to the audience, often accompanied by candles, a single stroboscopic light, and large amounts of smoke." 

So their live presentation sucks too I guess? I wonder what they charge for tickets. I tried sincerely to find but was not able to. The question is how much would you pay to see a band literally turn their backs to you and play behind smoke to a single strobe? I wouldn't pay anything for it, and I wouldn't pay this band for music or merch either, but I have already paid. TWICE now with the most precious resource of all-Time. I would like to declare bankruptcy and move on now.

I don't mid unpleasant listening experiences.  I am happy to listen to extreme outputs that defy shape and form at the best of times with Portal, Diocletian and Mitochondrion all being far from strangers to my ears.  I take pleasue in trying to squeeze under the oppressive layers of such music trying to piece it all together in my puny human brain.  Based on this, the assault that Dragged Into Sunlight deliver should really float my boat.  However, it leaves my boat moored to the dock side with little intention of setting sail anytime soon.

First of all, although I referenced those three bands earlier, it is unfair to compare DIS to any of those titans of extreme death metal.  DIS have a reasonable sense of structure to their sound with discernible blackened/punk influences present in the mix.  They aim for the throat from the offing with their frenzied and uncontrollable approach to putting a track into full-flow but can build and vary the configuration of a track, dropping into death/doom pace and back out again in the blink of an eye.

Where they fall down in my eyes is the length of songs on the record.  Arrangement wise this is far more an uncomfortable listen than any of the harsh and abrasive notes or vocals on the album.  The times vary from just under three minutes to over eleven minutes, and there's only six songs on the record.  As a result the album feels very disorientated and struggles to maintain any momentum.  It feels like the quality filter is definitely not switched in the "On" position and virtually all ideas are considered valid resulting in drawn out and unnecessary content that feels like it should end long before it actualy does.  The band deploy a lot of spoken word excerpts that only really add to this sense of chaos.

From reading their bio on the internet the band appears to be made up of various artists from all over the UK so I am not sure how often they get together to rehearse or what process they go through as part of the songwriting stage but it souds like a band that is fragmented and almost in opposition to themselves in a way.  It's an example of how you can push something to the nth degree of extremity and eventually make it no longer challenging to listen to.  For all the racket going on here I am very distracted by most of my surroundings throughout this record because my mind is just not interested in trying to decipher what's going on.  There's no layers here for me to squeeze under because they are all balled up in piles everywhere due to the complete lack of cohesion present on the record.