Band:	Six Feet Under
Album:	Crypt Of The Devil
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	May 2015

01. Gruesome
02. Open Coffin Orgy [feat. Ray Suhy]
03. Broken Bottle Rape
04. Break The Cross In Half [feat. Rebecca Scammon]
05. Lost Remains
06. Slit Wrists
07. Stab
08. The Night Bleeds
09. Compulsion To Brutalize
10. Eternal Darkness

Chris Barnes ruins everything. Never in the history of music has anyone managed to shoot their own band in the foot more times than Chris Barnes. Even Nathan Explosion can hold it together long enough to record his vocals properly, and he's not even real. There must be some kind of law against utterly destroying this many albums. I'm shocked that Six Feet Under have not yet kicked Chris out and started anew as a band with an actual singer. I was hoping for a Graveyard Classics IV to review, but this will do.

"Gruesome" fooled me. That song is a loose cannon that doesn't play by the rules and gets things done; it sounds like The Bleeding-era Cannibal Corpse played by Evisceration Plague-era Cannibal Corpse. After a minute of "Gruesome," I was almost ready to apologize to Six Feet Under and give them the benefit of the doubt, hoping that maybe they had made the conscious decision to not totally suck for once. Almost. Then I came to my senses. Much in the same way that Chris likes to throw one sucker punch and run away to hide on his tour bus, he throws out one good song and then abandons all responsibility for finishing the album. Of course, that still gives him far too much credit, because his? inimitable vocals feed "Gruesome" through the wood chipper to the point that it, too, might as well be euthanized like the dead horse they've been flogging. Maybe we can hook these guys up with the screaming mental patients that Stalaggh use for their vocals.

As much as I would like to blame Chris's voice for the entirety of this braindead cesspool of fetid failure, I cannot. We also have to consider his songwriting abilities. At least I usually get the impression that Six Feet Under would be listenable, even enjoyable, if anyone else handled the vocals. Literally anyone. Even me. The six-year-old girl from Sockweb. Saturn's moon Enceladus. A hyena. The color blue. Bono. Okay, not Bono. But you see my point: while no one would ever call them a shining paragon of innovative, world-class death metal, Six Feet Under would be about 800% less irredeemable garbage without the constant sound of Chris hacking up a hairball.

Not so with Crypt Of The Devil; much like on their godawful Graveyard Classics series, the instrumentalists of Six Feet Under demonstrate their impeccable ability to make ten songs sound like one horribly disastrous song. Even without Chris the Terrible behind the wheel, there would be no saving these abysmally grueling concoctions of cancerous stomach acid and regurgitated goat brains. Already by "Open Coffin Orgy" they stumble around haphazardly, as if it were the first death metal song they had ever written. Crypt Of The Devil maintains roughly that same level of indistinguishable, pasty blandness for the rest of its intensely boring running time. At least you don't have to worry about being environmentally conscious if you buy this album, because it's made of 100% recycled materials.

Calculating the final score for this album was a simple procedure. Incredibly average death metal = 6, automatically divided in half due to the presence of Chris Barnes. Do you remember the scene in the original Dawn Of The Dead where Roger kills a zombie by shoving a screwdriver through its ear? Well, I can't confirm this, but I suspect that Chris's mission was to replicate on record the experience of that unfortunate corpse. That's certainly how I feel after multiple sessions of Crypt Of The Devil.