So I had no idea what was happening when I first hit play on this new Misanthropy record The Ever-Crushing Weight of Stagnance, the third studio album for this Illinois act via Transcending Obscurity Records. Now this is without a doubt one of my favorite record labels and I’d say 99.9999% of the time what I’m hearing is a home run. Not in this case, however.
No,no, relax. This is not gonna be a review in which I relentlessly bash the band. Quite frankly I’m too old and tired to do that anymore. But I will say this. There really isn’t a whole lot to sink my teeth into, and there is a lot, I mean a lot of meandering around town when it comes to this brand of progressive death metal.
Now, to be fair when it works it really works. Case in point is “The All-Devouring” one of the record’s best and brightest cuts. A second example would be the next track “A Cure For the Pestilence.” But I was not very impressed with the opener “Of Sulking and the Wrathful.” You just feel like it really wasn’t headed anywhere. Again, we have another banger in “Condemned to a Nameless Tomb” but that kind of intensity can’t save numbers like “Sepulcher” or “Consumed By the Abyss.” Both of these just felt like paths to nowhere in the heavy metal forest. Hey, John Q. listener might hear something I don’t, who knows?
On another positive note “Descent” is a rager bent on wrecking shop, so there’s that. It’s done in slow, deliberate fashion, so this scribe definitely dug that. Look, they can’t all be home run records, right? Did I hate the album? No. It just didn’t really move the needle. You be the judge, though.
Standout Tracks: “Descent”, “The All-Devouring”, “A Cure For the Pestilence”.