Band:	Horrendous
Album:	The Chills
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	January 02, 2012
A review by:	wormdrink414

01. The Womb
02. Ripped To Shreds
03. Altars
04. The Somber (Desolate Winds)
05. Fleshrot
06. The Ritual
07. Fatal Dreams
08. Sleep Sickness
09. The Eye Of Madness

There are two kinds of people: those who buy big-name, boxed cereal and those who settle for the generics in the bags. Yeah, there are "people" who don't eat cereal at all, but they're inconsequential to the extreme, so they don't count.

Horrendous have made a generics-in-the-bags kind of DM album here.

That said, I'm not so sure that calling them a generics-in-the-bags band is fair just yet. Happens that, like with Malt-O-Meal's Cinnamon Toasters, say, the generics-in-the-bags in question is just as tasty as the big-name stuff it copies (Cinnamon Toast Crunch?). They've made a clone kind of album here, but it's got just as much flavor and attitude (or "soul," if that's not too stupid to use here) as the original bands' DNA that all their pounding riffage is copied from.

It's an old school-style, revivalist death metal album that sounds unequivocally like an old school-style, revivalist death metal album. But, in this case, I mean that in the closest-to-best-way possible. It's nasty, Florida meets Martin Van Duren meets a Flux Capacitor meets a meat grinder, br00tal shit that shouldn't be passed up without at least sampling. It's got the dirt, got the muck and slime, got the evil-sounding, slightly doomed-out melodic flourishes, and has got all of the fuck-you-I'll-chew-your-face-off kind of attitude one expects from the sort of things Floridians have influenced; everything you need to start headbutting your pets.

Is it derivative? Shit yes, it is. Almost every fucking moment. But, contrived? No. It sounds like it wasn't made solely out of hero-worship and faux-nostalgia; it was made because Horrendous can do what the American DM bands of yore did/do, and do it just as well. It's not by any stretch original, nor is it honestly all that unique, but it sounds real fucking good.