MACABRE DEMISE: Awakening
Release year: 2020
Label: RTM Productions
With a cover like this, it doesn’t take much to guess what’s on offer here. Naturally you’re right: death metal. Of the brutal kind. You’ll probably not be surprised when you discover there are also grinding moments and some more grooving sections, maybe even the occasional nod towards slam, giving the third album of the German one-man band a somewhat modern touch.
So we’re not in for any surprises here, in other words.
Awakening delivers indeed pretty much just what you’d expect based on the cover and the name. There are absolutely no surprises in store here, and precious little originality, either. If you’ve been listening to gore-drenched, grind-infused death metal even a bit, you’ll feel quite familiar with the album from the go.
And that’s the biggest problem with Awakening, really: it’s all been done before. And, frankly, it’s been done better. That’s not to say Awakening is bad, because it isn’t; the sound is pretty beefy, the playing sounds tight (especially with one guy handling all instrumentation), the growls are prefectly decent, and the songs nice little ditties. But it never gets better than “nice”, and in an over-saturated genre like this, “nice” doesn’t really cut it. With neither extraordinary quality nor a considerable degree of originality as trump cards, Macabre Demise just sink into the mass.
I guess you could say that as far as dime-a-dozen death metal goes, Macabre Demise is solid. And certainly, if you just can’t get enough of brutal death metal, the German project will be right up your alley. But in the long run, there’s not just enough here to keep at least me coming back.
2/5
Only Death Is Real 