HYMEN HOLOCAUST - Hymen Holocaust MCD | REVIEWS | Dutch Goregrind band of Morris Cliteater

A goregrind project with a very cool name by a member of the accomplished Dutch band Cliteater, Hymen Holocaust has got to rule, right? Wrong. I thought so too earlier but I was so disappointed that I contemplated suicide. Debut album Necromance had elements of some of the biggest and best Dutch goregrind acts, yet for some inexplicable reason it failed miserably. Well, that was because the album for the most part sounded like a poor version of all those bands, a contrived mixture of their music presented in delectable lo-fi sickness but delivered in a manner that was exasperatingly lethargic, and for that reason left the usually effervescent goregrind listener highly unmoved. On their third major attempt then, I expected Hymen Holocaust, a band with doubtless potential and unwavering faith of their label, to better my impressions of it if not just impress me. It did neither.

On Hymen Holocaust the blatant Dutch goregrind influences are thankfully toned down. Though they are still pretty obvious, their music has sufficiently evolved from that of a copy-paste band. Morris plays garbled, laboriously impelled tunes that range from the insidiously slow to the aggressively ominous, and others that just lay throbbing in their festering sickness, staining the floor red with the trail of its dawdling snail-like gait, and at times lunging ahead to powerful beats that are akin to Cliteater. Embellished by husky, pitchshifted Last Days of Humanity-esque vocals and interweaved with the skeletal groove of Satan's Revenge On Mankind and a highly crude and unsophisticated version of the Dead/new CBT-driven groove band TDEBN, Hymen Holocaust should sound like a real treat, except that in actuality so deadened and integrated are these relief parts into its sound, the music seems utterly lacking in any significant impetus. Vacillating from slow and mid paced music to a strained attempt at blasting without any distinct change in its momentum, the music feels like a drawn-out static song, punctuated only by short mood-enhancing intros from the movie Der Todesking. The drudgingly played riffs may work for Bile wherein it would gel with the band's dark and brooding atmosphere, but not necessarily in this case where sickness is the order of the day, and such parts, especially grooves, can easily be rendered ineffective if not executed with sufficient alacrity. Falling awkwardly between tatty lo-fi sickness and sluggish semi-groovy goregrind, Hymen Holocaust's music is not very agreeable.

Hymen Holocaust is a putrid buzzfest of mildly enjoyable lo-fi goregrind bumbling through its short length. A gruesome, horrible- looking, potentially cool zombie that takes but too much time to get to its victim.

Hymen Holocaust - Hymen Holocaust MCD