It's here, friends..
Still super fake-y drum sound, but fuck it.

Hrm, I am reserving my judgement till the full album, but I fear a "Son, I am disappoint" situation here.

Sweet fucking shit.
Tech Death..
THAT'S FUCKING HEAVY AS HELL.

The thing I love about this album is that after 11 years it has lost none of the intensity and all the imitators have never come close to it.

Lots of imitators, indeed.
They practically spawned their own sub-genre..

Yeah, botch was great man. When American Nervoso came out, it was just about exactly where my brain was in 1999. They were doing a way better job of it than the band i was playing in though, so at the same time i thought it was awesome, i was a little pissed.

Another awesome one was from just the year before, Coalesce's Functioning On Impatience. Pretty much the same effect on me, but Botch was more the style i was into then overall as a full package.

I sold We Are the Romans on dual colored vinyl a few years ago for more than $250 also, which was sweet. I had no idea it would go for that much back then.

Holy shit thats some ebay madness!

Botch and converge pretty much created their own genre and then set the bar so high very few other bands were eligible to join it.

Yup Converge were also going crazy right about that same time period. That is also when my band recorded our demo with Kurt from Converge. I was the drummer, but while we were waiting in the control room for someone to do get ready i was playing his guitar and he asked me if i wanted to join in the Metal Guitar Olympics competing with him and Steve from Cave-In. It was pretty amusing. Then he tackled one of my guitarists. Which was even more amusing.

But the highlight of that was hearing the When Forever Comes Crashing rough mixes through his monitors after we were done mixing our demo. I had no idea what to make of it at the time. It was such a leap from Petitioning The Empty Sky, to my ears. Awesome.

Goddamnit, stories like that make me wish I was in a more musically active area..
Sometimes I want to move to Seattle (actually WITHIN the city) for this very reason.

Actually, Kurt actually "plays" some guitar on that demo, also.

The beginning to this one: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_so ... ID=8317117

The slayeresque feedback and the stabby dissonant part pretty much up to just before before the classy/ridiculous spoken vocal, that is Kurt, playing a strat into a Crate GX130C. He wouldn't let us record with the amp(so we used his marshalls instead), but for that overdub he wanted to use the Crate so he could throw the head around and make the reverb tank crashing noise(which you can't hear so much because he buried himself in the mix when we went back to fix something else, but which was fun to watch go down).

The first mix he did, we made him leave it awesome and loud. I only have that mix on a DAT tape though.

Also: my tempo was seriously fucked up back in 1998.

Why wouldn't he let you use the GX130?

And as Geoff and I have said before;
No matter how much you talk down this demo it is still righteous as fuck.

Man, this album stomps all kinds of ass.
Insane guitar work, great drums, great vocals, great production.
Highly recommend for fans of Decapitated or anyone who likes brutal riff-age.

He was NOT into the Crate at all. He pretty much called bullshit on it as soon as the two guitarist brought them in the room. He wasn't a dick about it at all, very tactful, but i definitely felt that he was firmly against tracking the main guitars with them. I think partly he just saw two Crate heads (with matching cabs!) and thought to himself "oh fuck guitar center kids with too much gain" or something. I also assume that he just felt more comfortable getting guitar sounds with his own rig. I didn't have a problem with it, because frankly, at that time, those guys probably were using too much gain. That was just how it was.

And, it would sound a million times better if the second guitarist had his tone knob on IMO.

These slams do not slam. And vocals that aren't guttural layered with other vocals that aren't guttural to try and make it sound guttural... I would expect that from a band with a gimmick woman frontlady instead.

Maybe I am expecting the wrong things but I am not excite about what I hear.

Trust me, I'm not impressed much with this either if you read what I said right after posting it..
I just hope the rest of the album doesn't sound like this.

At least we have AP to look forward to... Ezophagothomia also left me a little disappoint. The drum sounds they replaced with are so bad, and the songs don't seem to have as much depth as on the demo...

Diamanda at her most accessible:


Pretty much straight-up blues save for the intro. just her and her piano. (She likes the low notes!) Not brutal noise at all.

I'd love to hear a duet with her and Tom Waits.