Damn. My original title for this review was too long.. anyway, here it is: “The unforgivable and humiliating fall from grind-core into medio-core”
First of all. on paper this album is just a good Agathocles’ effort. Typical riffs, typical lyrics. You won’t find any surprises here since the band stopped evolving since 2001. Once again this album has a new line-up yet this time main man Jan has switched from bass to guitar (of course he still is lead vocalist obviously). I can imagine this line-up couldn’t play most songs from the Humarrogance-era since Jan is not quite the axeman Matty and Steve were. But let’s not digress (I’ll do that later) now since it’s about all the new songs here.
Scuttlebutt has it it’s not going well, personally, with Jan for a few years now. Keeping that in mind, the decreased quality (standardisation) of lyrics and music can be looked upon from a different perspective. Agathocles seem to be on automatic pilot for some time now. The automatic pilot results in a total lack of new ideas and, as said, standardised sound.
As a result this album is even slightly more ‘old school’ than their 2006 album “Mincer” already was. It’s short grinders and brief punk-stompers all over and this time and there are far less ‘longer’ songs. With longer I mean everything exceeding the two-minute mark. On previous effort “Mincer” the amount of well thought through and quite dynamic compositions was reasonably high and they kept the album’s average from falling into grindcore mediocrity. This time this kind of songs is dearly missed. A full length album, longer than half an hour, only consisting of short grinders yet staying interesting the whole time is not something which can be done easily! Agathocles unfortunately don’t realise they’re not in their prime anymore and automated songwriting doesn’t do them any good either…
Are they bad songs? No, not really. They’re quite decent. On paper that is. “Paula” is quite a nice catchy tune. But Agathocles should do more than decent! But to make things worse, apart from being ‘only decent’, the sound and performance just do not stand out anymore. Not standing out compared to contemporary artist but even worse: when compared to their own works from the nineties. Agathocles are becoming a painful shadow of themselves. Maybe it’s time Jan took some time off from the scene and his band. Maybe it’s time Jan makes a true effort to regain (instead of copying) his original eagerness, awareness and youthfulness in whatever way possible or at least gets his brain to start working forward instead of backwards…
I’m not going into the tragic story of bassist Tony Schepkens who’s last recordings these are so I’ll just focus on the worst element, performance-wise, on this album: the drums.
The only thing new drummer Nils Laureys has working from him is that Agathocles’ earliest drummer Erwin Vandenbergh was even worse. And that’s about it. Nils is just terrible. One can hear the intentions and ideas behind his drums, which are decent, but the performance fails horribly. The boy is too sloppy but most important: slow. His blasts sound dragging (please go to Mick Harris and take lessons in intensity!) and his polka and d-beat are more than an inch short of Burt Beyens’ powerful fast attacks. Previous drummer Roel Tulleneers wasn’t all that but Nils is even worse.
With this Nils boy inadequately hitting pots and pans and Jan playing simple basslines on guitar, the band is slowly rotting. Dissolving into a humiliating pile of parodyism… Agathocles are now at a point when songwriting as well as performance are failing. Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel…
rafazardly 