Death metal | Grindcore | Metal
70%
Unborn Suffer—Is This What We’ve Created? (2006)
Details
Recorded at Bleyd Studio in Bydgoszcz, Poland between 21 of January and 23 of March 2006. Released on the Russian label Soulflesh Collector Records.
Track listing
- Human
- Death’s Birth
- …And You’re No More
- P.N.M.
- Whore
- Drink Until I Die
- Progression/Suppression
- Deceived, Betrayed, Killed, Enslaved
- Drilling For Brains (Mortician cover)
- Collateral Damage (Brutal Truth cover)
- Times Of Lament (instrumental)
- Throwaway
Review
I’d never heard of Unborn Suffer before. Or if I have then they will have been one of the hundreds of bands whose album reviews I’ve glanced over in the pages of Terrorizer magazine but never had the opportunity to listen to.
Thanks to the mighty Encyclopaedia Metallum I discovered that Unborn Suffer are a death metal / grindcore band hailing from Poland. This is their second full-length album, released in 2006. It contains 12 tracks and comes in at 25′ 06″; five tracks are under one minute in length.
The album opens with some sweeping chords from a keyboard, overlaid with a spoken narrative. Not quite what I expected.
There is almost an unwritten rule in metal that if you can’t read the band’s name on the album then they must be from one of the extreme sub-genres; and the more illegible the logo the more extreme the music.
I was expecting something brutal, not this gentle wash of electronic keyb… ah! there it is now! Head crushing guitars, tuned-down bass, superhuman blast beats and what my mum would probably called “just a lot of noise and shouting”.
The album reminds me of a cross between Florida’s Morbid Angel (around the Blessed are the Sick era) and Entombed; Birmingham’s Napalm Death and New York grindcore band Brutal Truth (which isn’t surprising really given that they cover Brutal Truth’s Collateral Damage.
In many ways the album is unremarkable: it’s very generic, a very able example of the genre with a couple of cover tunes thrown in from New York grindcore bands Brutal Truth and Mortician, but little more. But that kind of does it a disservice because as it stands, on its own, it is a very fine example of extreme metal.
It’s a bit like watching the film of an avalanche. On the first viewing you are struck by the sheer power and violence of the landslide. But on further viewings you begin to notice the smaller details.
One track that stands out on the album, but equally is unrepresentative of Unborn Suffer, is the penultimate song, an instrumental, Times of Lament which opens with the eerie sound of a child crying in an echoing building which leads into a couple of minutes of death metal riffage, a few samples and then some discordant acoustic riffs. It feels experimental, but I quite liked it for that… even if the child crying really freaked me out at the start!
Conclusion
While the album is fairly generic I did rather enjoy it…so long as I didn’t read the lyrics! Would I listen to it again? I’ve listened to it three times through this evening and with each listening I heard something different, something new, as I went deeper into it. More than just the noise and shouting that it immediately presents on the first listen. Yes, I’d listen to this again.
Review score: 70%