Malevolent Creation - Retribution (1992)^{Release ID: 3773}

It's fascinating how many bands start their existence on fire, and then can never manage to match that sort of performance from that point onwards. Malevolent Creation released two great albums back in the early 90s, with their debut The Ten Commandments and this follow-up both being quality examples of exciting, well produced death metal. Eight albums later and while they've remained reasonably solid, they've never hit these heights ever again.

While Retribution doesn't differ all that much from the debut, it's just good, well executed Floridian death metal, with excellent riffs, kick ass drumming and some truly awesome vocals. Brett Hoffman has one of the best growls in the business and this album is his finest achievement. Slaughter of Innocence is one the bands greatest ever tracks and Eve of the Apocalypse and Systematic Execution are right up there also.

Yet even though I obviously enjoy this a fair bit, I still can’t give Retribution any more than 4 stars. It doesn’t really offer anything that heaps of other bands haven’t already put out over the years. But what it does, it does well, and with a large dose of passion. Not surprisingly, considering the amount of work he did back in the early 90s for extreme metal, Dan Seagrave created the monstrous atrocity adorning the album cover.

I find that some albums get talked about in hushed tones amongst peers, internet forums and album reviews generally.  There's a catgeory of albums in most genres of music that has a label akin to "Classic Album Not Freely Recognised As Such".  Quite where these albums go to after release in terms of the recognition stakes is no real mystery when you think about it, with most of them being released around a particular boom time for a genre and them just getting lost in the plethora of qualty releases of the time only to be picked up in years to come and almost reborn in some cult status awarde by devout fans of the genre.

Malevolent Creation's second album is one such album that comes up now and again in such conversations, and whilst I don't believe it does necessarily warrant a "classic" tag as such there's still so much to appreciate about this record that it is really unfortunate that it is not up there with the regard I hold for Last One On Earth, Acts of the Unspeakable, Tomb of the Mutiliated, Legion. The IVth Crusade or Onward to Golgotha all of which landed in the same year as this record.

There's certainly a rabid edge to Retribution that matches the Deicide release quoted and there's certainly a level of intensity to proceedings that draws comparison to the Cannibal Corpse release also of the same year.  These comparisons come from Hoffman's vocals and the pummeling attack of the instrumentation in no small parts but I actually don't get on with the vocals that well.  If anything, at times I find he has too much to say and things become a little cumbersome around the delivery and flow of the tracks.  The rest of the time he's doing nothing wrong and things feel much more cohesive and structured.

That niggle withstanding (and as Ben alludes to in his review) this is actually a great death metal album that simpy gets overlooked by more prominent and more obvious classic releases from the same year.  There's nothing new here most definitey and whatever the reason may be that you find yourself coming late to the record it still hampers the experience of it because you will have already heard such great output both from the same year and subsequently over the years.  Still worthy of a spin though.