Rating: 6.2

Country: Slovakia

Release Date: 2008

Record Label: Grodhaisn Productions

Track list:
1. Intro
2. Bloody Martyrium
3. All You Need is Gore
4. Resection Inside
5. Cold Cut
6. Disfigured by Blind Faith
7. Flesh on the Sun
8. Synthetically Mutilated
9. Disease

Total playing time 27:41

Band Website: Typhoid

Typhoid - Disfigured by Blind Faith

Roman Regina - Guitar and Vocals
Rado Godal - Guitar
Jozef Flimel - Bass, Vocals
Duso Mokry - Drums

Slovak brutal death metal band Typhoid last released an mini-album in 2002 called Deoxyribonucleic Accident. It was a hefty brutal album similar to the Cannibal Corpse influenced German bands with adorable wobbly momentum and great old school breaks; it was almost like a perennially drunk fat wife-beating bastard throwing his weight around. After six years they have come out with another much-anticipated release, this time a full length album.

First impressions of Disfigured by Blind Faith are great – cool artwork, nice hard paper booklet (typical Grodhaisn stuff), ideal production from their own famed Typhoid Sound Lab. I had already begun fantasizing about the high rating I would end up giving it, how maybe this album will make it to my best albums of 2008 list, how I will flash their CD at random people on the street/bus/train making them gasp, etc., you know how it is. Three songs into it and like an intelligent conversation with a blonde on a first date, it soon petered out. Repeated exposure only made it worse, obviously. It was only a matter of time before its banality became as glaring as the depth of her cleavage.

Think of a chugging third world train with a rusty seesaw fitted on top of it. As the train chugs forth, some hired grown up kids jump on the seesaw making it swing with squeaking sounds. If you can imagine the sound of that then you already know what Typhoid's music sounds like for the most part - locomotive chugs and swinging parts with excessive pinch harmonics which try real hard to pass off as riffs. And for the intervening sections that would normally form an important part of the songs, you have the blandest kind of technicality – think Deeds of Flesh having a forgettable riff day – which gets worse as they get indulgent thanks to their clinical approach towards it. There are, however, some good riffs, particularly the song openers that hark back to the glory days of early Cannibal Corpse (mostly Butchered at Birth) and during such moments it is easy to notice their vocalist's resemblance to Chris Barnes.

Typhoid's music could roughly be likened to a cross between a more refined Bloodboil and a slower Gomorrha, except that these bands possessed tremendous momentum and in Typhoid's case it is not as active. If momentum was this corpulent fat kid who ran about all day and made everyone around follow him with interest, aboard this desperately revamped Typhoid train, bored, he is merely rocking on his mom's lap. The train stops at many stations along the way, picks up speed after that too, goes through the old, eyeroll-inducing Cannibal Corpse and Suffocation tunnels, but without any fickle-minded momentum to run about and cause mischief, the passengers will only get increasingly bored each time they take the journey.

Disfigured by Blind Faith is not as bad an album as I have made it sound. It is loaded with catchy parts, titillating harmonics and endearing locomotive chugs for a brutalhead to revel in. According to me though, that is not enough to make a brutal album enjoyable, at least not on a long term basis. And when those sections are repeated as often as they are in a cyclic pattern without a particularly compelling momentum, it does get tiresome after a point.

August 5th, 2008