Band:	Skinless
Album:	Only The Ruthless Remain
Style:	Brutal death metal
Release date:	May 2015

01. Serpenticide
02. Only The Ruthless Remain
03. Skinless
04. Flamethrower
05. The Beast Smells Blood
06. Funeral Curse
07. Barbaric Proclivity

You need four things to make an album, right? Something old: original vocalist Sherwood Webber, returning to duty. Something new: recent addition Dave Matthews on guitar (no, not that Dave Matthews). Something borrowed: most of these songs. Something blue: me after sitting through this.

Skinless are one of the biggest names in brutal death metal, for reasons that remain unclear to me; even their banner release, Trample The Weak, Hurdle The Dead barely moves under its own power, subsisting heavily on the images of other, better albums it projects into your mind. At their best, Skinless have always struck me as being "yet another death metal band," and this is not Skinless at their best. I have listened to this album countless times now, and I cannot recall one single occasion on which I noticed one song coming to a halt and the next song beginning.

"Skinless" has a pretty gruesome groove, though fleeting, as with all things good; soon, the unintelligible mass of harmonics, lightning runs, and double bass drown and consume it like the rest of the songs. If nothing about this can stand out amongst Skinless material, then it certainly has no hope of standing out amongst Skinless's competition.

Only The Ruthless Remain is akin to the experience of throwing slabs of raw meat at a concrete wall with your buddies. It's brutal work, and you'll get all bloody and look really cool and have whatever bragging rights accompany this venture. And if somebody on the street stops you to ask why you're covered in suspicious blood spatter and chunks of uncooked beef? You can say, "Hey, man, I was pitching cow flanks against concrete all day," and they'll say, "Man, that's brutal." But what have you accomplished? The wall isn't going to fall down. The meat isn't going to get cooked. After a while, it gets boring, and any sane person would say, "You know what? I'm going to join a prog band."

The stupidity of that metaphor in itself is a metaphor for this album. It's full of all the requisite trappings of an album, but it can't bring any of them together to make sense. It struggles and strains against mediocrity, but the songs simply fail to build something greater out of the basic materials they are presented with. What does death metal mean, however brutal, if it cannot be negotiated into a cohesive album with interesting and memorable songs that somehow establish themselves as more worthy than whatever else you could be listening to?