Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for God Disease - Drifting Towards Inevitable Death (2019)

Finnish death metal has crawled onto my radar this week, completely unannounced.  After my mid-week flirtation with Lantern today I am sat down with death/doom mob God Disease.  With a range of influences obvious, from Paradise Lost to Incantation to Runemagick, there's little surprise at the melancholic and desolate tones of this record.  Man those guitars club at the soul itself, leaving long-lasting bruises that take a while to heal.  There's parts of this record that will be ringing around my head for days after just one listen.

It's fair to say they have that cold and yet somehow enriching Finnish dm sound in the bag here, if anything the album positively drips with it.  The sadness from those guitars saturates the tracks, drowning them in their cloying viscosity.  The vocals growl and grumble over the top in perfect Incantation worship and compliment the slower sections really well.  The problem I have is with the bass.  It is far too twangy in the mix to the point of being distracting, in fact it gives the tracks a very mechanised feel like we are all of a sudden listening to a Fear Factory record.  I am not sure if this is by design or is an unexpected outcome of the mixing process, but either way it is a massive stumbling block for me.

The album is perfectly capable of standing up on its pillars of solid riffs and pummelling drums without this.  On the occasions that the bass does calm down and allow the other instruments to breathe the album is in fact at its finest; dragging and lurching itself forwards nicely with the bass sat as part of the instrumentation, the rest of the time the bass is all I hear above everything else. It is a shame because there is real promise here but in a way you just can't get at it.