Banishment "Cleansing The Infirm"

Tracklist: 01. Maelstrom Of Restless Indignation 02. Adverse Offering From The Supreme 03. Translucent Birth Of Iniquity 04. Obscure Benevolence 05. Shroud Of Infamy 06. An Inimical Figure 07. Detriment 08. Cleansing The Infirm 09. Scourge Under Empyreal Treachery Release: 2008 Genre: Brutal Death Metal URL: www.myspace.com/banishmentdeathmetal Label: www.laceratedenemy.com

So here it is the debut album from the American Death Metal combo Banishment. After the 2006 demo the band's first full lenght finally came out on Lacerated Enemy Records this summer. "Cleansing The Infirm" will punish your ears with almost 30 minutes of top notch Cali-Death Metal without the progressive touch many bands out of that area have nowadays. Banishment offer a great mixture of old-school and new-school Death Metal. Most of the time the riffs are pretty technical but they are always catchy and this fact is kind of important to me because what is so good about playing the most technical stuff ever if the listener will not keep anything of it in his mind? Here I have to add that Banishment do not have any long and excessive blasting parts but many mid-tempo parts which I think are the best! These kind of doomy passages are my highlights on the entire CD because the band knows how to create a dark atmosphere by playing the right harmonies and melodies. The vocals are pretty good as well. Imer is not as guttural as other singers from Californian Death Metal bands but he still has some good and deep growls that fit perfectly to this kind of Death Metal. As good as the music may be there is still one thing that really bothers me about the debut of these four guys from the Golden State and this thing is the production. The sound of the drums is pretty rough and I usually like it that way but sometimes when there is some blasting going on it starts to sound sloppy and because of the production itself I cannot certainly say if it's the production's fault or if the drummer is just lacking of skills. The sound of the guitars is not ideal either. It sounds quite thin, the distortion is not that heavy and there is definitely some bass missing. But as we speak about bass, some of you probably have noticed that there was an announcment on the Banishment MySpace profile about "Big" Dave Gonzales getting a new 9-string bass guitar from Bee Basses and that he already uses a 7-string bass guitar and the first thought that came up to my mind after reading that was "fuck that dude has to have some serious skills if he can handle such a monstrous bass. I hope he will do a solo or something in that way on the Banishment record!" And what heppend? Nothing! No solo, no special basslines that are significantly different from what the guitars play, simply nothing! If I'm right I just heard him twice on the whole CD and that is way to rare if you think abouth the hype around Big Dave. I can just advise the guys from Banishment to give Dave an opportunity to show his talent on the next CD. Then they just have to add a better production to it and after that nothing can go wrong in my opinion because even if "Cleansing The Infirm" is not bursting as heavy out of your speakers as it could have been musically there is really nothing to complain about!

Rating: 82 % | from Scaphism | Date: 25.10.2008 | Time: 00:45	shut down