Melody + Brutality + Perfection = Banquet in the Darkness

Band Info

Intestine Baalism are one of those bands who never ever fail at producing the best material around. They are my number one favourite band for the past 4ish years now, and they have held on to that spot extremely well, even through my alternating musical phases, this artist has still trumped all the best other subgenres and genres can offer. they play nothing unique , but what they do play is perfection itself. The artist has only released 3 albums and one demo across the span of 13 years, however a master piece is not written in a short period of time, it must be slowly crafted and perfected before it can be unleashed on humanity. Unfortunately I can't find too much about the band, alot of the info on them is repeated on other sites, and original information is hard to come by, and the language barrier doesnt help, although my use of google translate keeps bringing me across Japanese medical archives/info pages.  Although this page here seems to be the most informal and useful.(Note the link uses Google translate)

The Review

As I mentioned earlier, Intestine Baalism are my all time favourite band, and this is my favourite release by them, being the "enlightened" person I am, I intend to write this review in a truthful manner so well that you will be automatised to get this album, and set up your own blog to write a review of how good this album is.

Well firstly this album has the ability to cure world hunger, nah just kidding, not even sure why I came up with this example, but If albums could solve world hunger, I'm sure this would be the one which could do it single handedly. I have not even begun to touch on the sheer brilliance of this album...

 Intestine Baalism literally take the best of NWOBHM, Death Metal and Melodic music of some sort and craft these phenomenal sounds, it alternates between serene and harshness perfectly with logistical flow, and creating this intense atmosphere. Although the sentence above may sound very eloquent and nice, those of you who have not heard it before will be none the wiser as to it, in my kind hearted mood I have decided to break Intestine Baalism down piece by piece.

Where best to start than the very first song? No use answering it in your head for it is a question which has answered itself. The beginning of Flesh for the Omnipotent is your average typcial death metal of sorts, a nice set of heavy riffs interlaced with well structured drumming, then the vocals cut in after about 50 seconds, your sort of husky smoker death metal voice, this is then mirrored with the second vocalist acting as a delayed higher pitched echo, after a bit of that it slows down to a single riff and drum beat and then just kicks into a tantrum of fast drumming with rapid riffing and more defined vocals. So far so good this is pretty good death metal you are thinking, then it happens.....
It instantly flows into an amazing melody, I mean the shift is near instantaneous,but not irksome it is like one continuous flow, the melody isn't any of that super fast crazy guitar playing, It sounds like something straight out of a classical piece tinted with a tad of metal to give it that edge. As well as the melody came in, it exits with equal grace as the death metal takes hold and carries on, and then song ends, but with one of those endings that is clear cut and definitive and not one of the ones where a lot of bands just sandwich in another solo to show off their guitar skills.

I would love to describe every single last song to the last detail, whilst having it playing, however there are just not enough hours in a day, and I'm sure most of you could probably appropriate and listen to the content faster than reading the whole description of every song. So to keep up pace, I will carry on with a generalised review of the album.

I need not elaborate on the traits, strengths and weakness' which the musicians possess, all I need to say is imagine any sort of death metal and any sort of melodic song, in their purest and most perfect form and that pretty much sums up how well the musicians play.  A nice feature which I think is starting to become more common place, even in Grindcore ,but still quite on periphery is to include an instrumental track, and this is true with Intestine Baalism. The title of the track is called "A Keen", and features just plain acoustic guitar, there is nothing brutal about it, it is just a peaceful music, even us grinders need to relax every so often. Listening to the song literally makes you feel like you are floating away, but not because it sounds trippy it is just so peaceful I'm convinced the track secretly unlocks serotonin stored in your brain and makes you just feel happy. Now before I start to sound too much like a hippy, back to the metal!!!!!!!!

The title track Banquet in the Darkness, is yet another masterpiece, this is the 2nd track of the album, and already you can tell Intestine Baalism is one of these bands that doesn't follow a formula, they vary the ratio of brutality to melody with every individual song and do it in such a way that it fits the song best.  I do hate using the word brutal to try and describe the more darker side to their music, the word has been tainted by the posters of youtube for countless ridiculous deathcore and lower end brutal death metal, but I can't find any word that brings justice to describe it (the untainted implementation of the word brutal that is). This particular song focuses more on the melodical side of their, and shows they can do both melody and death equally well.

Sadly it is time to conclude, I hope I have been able to live up to my ambition: so those of you who don't have it get it, If you are still unconvinced then really and truly this is your loss, and will be probably be the greatest musical orientated mistake you ever make, by not checking out these guys. These people are like the Galileo's and Da Vinci's of our time, the material they are producing is just unquestionably the best in the world, like too many bands, this band has had no success in making it big, and are still very underground even among big melodic death metal fans.
Grind Out