Toxocara "The Great Rebellious"

Tracklist: 01. Godking 02. The Connate Conflict 03. Wake Of The Controversy 04. U-48 (Dive Of Death) 05. Among Amon 06. Fusillade The Coalescent 07. The Stories Of The Palatinian Succession 08. Maenadic Mausoleum Release: 2008 Genre: Death Metal URL: www.toxocara.com Label: www.twilight-vertrieb.de

Great now we have the shit! If we just haven't made all these stupid jokes about the Netherlands. Mrs. Antje from the neighboring tulips and cheese land is really pissed now and is therefore sending out her death troop into a war where the winner is already certain for the second time. After almost three years they are walking armed to their teeth to the front again with "The Great Rebellious". The newest opus of this quintet can attend with a total of eight tracks and I can already tell everybody at this point that indeed every track on this album is just mightily kicking ass. Most of the time there is pretty fast Death Metal blasted around the listener's ears that alternates with some sluggish passages and gets scattered through some samples from war movies and something similar. A conclusion to Houwitser who are also from the Netherlands can definitely be made as both bands have a special preference for everything that has directly and also indirectly to do with the topic war. Even the speed of both bands can often be settled at the same level. What distinguishes Toxocara from Houwitser is the fact that they are only dealing with the topic war while their Dutch fellows are also using gore lyrics. Everyone of the 8 tracks on "The Great Rebellious" discusses a different theme of war. No matter if they are philosophizing about the beauty of a bomb in "Wake Of The Controversy" or celebrate an ode to the swimming death in "U-48 (Dive Of Death)", it doesn't seem that the ideas of this band are running out so fast. The drums are standing on storm for the whole time and are blasting with the speed of a machine-gun one deadly salvo after another through the auditory canal of the listener while the guitars and the bass are cutting deep into the flesh equal to a bayonet and care for a high loss of blood until 38 minutes later finally the death sets in. Singer Kevin Quilligan accompanies the whole bloody slaughter celebration with cool brutal growls which are here and there also passing over into some guttural vocals and are fitting perfectly to the rest like a bullet in the head. Indeed their new label Twilight Vertrieb is describes the band as a technical band with a heavy old school touch but from both there is only a little bit to nothing really existing. Sure there are one or two nice passages which are flashing up some technical cleverness but comparing this with real technical bands like Brain Drill or Nile one can say that "The Great Rebellious" is a full length which is more living from its aggressiveness then from technical masterly-achievements. I was not able to determine a big old school impact here but this fact doesn't make Toxocara's newest work look any worse. What one also has to impute this band is how they packaged their current work. Considering the topic of war one could have also used a gore cover with mutilated, shot down and bombed carcasses. Instead of that they decided to use a noble white layout that has been decorated with some bullets and rusty red-brown elements (also including the complete lyrics and a bandpic) which is in my eyes a pretty welcome alternative to all the other sometimes uninspired looking artworks. It actually has already nearly somewhat artistic. In the end one can definitely say that theses Dutchman have compared to their previous release been able to increase their music in nearly all points. "The Great Rebellious" is more aggressive, has a better production and a cool layout. Everybody who is just a little bit into aggressive and well played Death Metal can't and shouldn't miss this full length, as it strikes like the mighty atomic bomb once in Hiroshima and exactly like this crashing weapon the actual album from Toxocara will leave its traces for a long time.

Rating: 87 % | from ScYthe | Date: 20.01.08 | Time: 23:50	shut down