Skinless - Only The Ruthless Remain - review
Skinless - Only The Ruthless Remain - review
Tracklist
01. Serpenticide02. Only The Ruthless Remain
03. Skinless
04. Flamethrower
05. The Beast Smells Blood
06. Funeral Curse
07. Barbaric Proclivity
A review by
ScreamingSteelUS October 20, 2015
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?
Rating breakdown
| Performance: | 8 |
| Songwriting: | 6 |
| Originality: | 3 |
| Production: | 7 |
Written on 20.10.2015 by
Written on 20.10.2015 by
Dull Music for Dull People Comments
Comments:
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You know what? This review summarizes my general feeling towards Brutal Death Metal very well. I mean, I like extreme music very much. I enjoy speed, aggressivity, inhuman vocals, etc. Yet I've always found Brutal Death as pointless, directionless music that leads nowhere and has no other goal than simply being brutal.for the sake of it. I believe no music is too brutal or extreme for me. It's just that I find it boring, dull, repetitive and not entertaining in any way.
---- "Why would we fear death, when life is so much more frightening?"
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Posts: 190  |
Posts: 190
With the amount of brutal death metal I've listened to, labeling bands like Skinless, Dying Fetus, Hour of Penance 2008 onward and Prostitute Disfigurement 2008 onward as brutal death metal seems kind of silly to me. Hell, I'll even say that Benighted is regular old deathgrind, rather than brutal death metal/grindcore. I feel like calling something brutal death metal warrants a certain low tuning and crushing sound these days. When I think brutal death metal, I think of bands like 7 H.Target, Abominable Putridity, Cephalotripsy, Cerebral Bore, Condemned, Defeated Sanity, Devourment, Disgorge, Guttural Secrete, Infernal Revulsion, Katalepsy and Pathology to name a few. But on topic: I agree with the review, this album is boring and generic. I can only name a single death metal album that was more boring to me than Only The Ruthless Remain this year, and that was Crusade:Zero by Hate. Even the new Kraanium album is more enticing, but again: that's a different genre of death metal in my opinion.
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Posts: 6684 Written by Coconut Racecar on 22.10.2015 at 00:51 I've seen Cannibal Corpse labeled as brutal death on a few occasions before, which I don't happen to agree with, but I don't think you'd be far out of line in saying that they are heavier than Skinless these days. And when taken along with the following comment: Written by Absak on 22.10.2015 at 05:48 I think you might be justified in questioning whether Skinless even deserves the brutal death label anymore. Of the bands you listed, the ones I'm familiar with I'd comfortably say are heavier (and better). It had been nine years since Skinless's last album, after all, and things moved on quite well without them. The results of this album show that when they aren't some of the brutal-est kids on the block Skinless don't have a lot to offer. "Brutal" seems like a relative term anyway, so perhaps that label can evolve. I'd also have to agree that Hate's new album is quite boring and even trumps this one in being generic.
---- "Earth is small and I hate it" - Lum Invader I'm the Agent of Steel.
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Posts: 64341 Written by Coconut Racecar on 22.10.2015 at 00:51 since when CC plays brutal death ... only big name in brutal death I can name is Krisiun
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die"  I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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Posts: 6101
The bands you're describing as brutal, Absak, are actually slam. It's a different subgenre from brutal, even though it is sometimes referred to as slamming brutal death metal. Regardless whether you call it slamming brutal or just slam, it is still different from brutal. I too have seen CC labelled brutal a few times, but that is totally wrong. They are indeed just regular death. I believe ignorant people just call them brutal because their lyrics are just "so brutal, man".
---- ~Zep, Former Database and Forum Moderation~ 
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