Review Livarkahil - Signs of Decay 2011

This band hails from France, Paris to be exact, a town of burning cars and chaotic traffic as well as a lot of other stuff that you can say about France and the french. They call themselves Livarkahil which seems to mean absolutely nothing, and really it doesn’t sound very cool to say either so why use a nonsense word which sounds ridiculous as band name? And while we are at it, the cover art will definitely not spark any interest in the band as it is really ugly and bad as well. Signs of Decay is the title of the album, I wonder what stroke of genius that brought such a name a up, typical name of a metal album I would say. Bit what about this french band then? this is their second album I have been able to find out from the interweb and it is a conceptual album around the subject of religious autocracy and it has been really well reviewed around the web. This might be interesting I figured before I realised that every album released is more or less well reviewed around the web these days so I decided that the best thing is not to have preconceptions which is why these subjects of cover art and reception and all of that was unknown to me before I started to collect the info for the review after I have already listened ten times to the album and decided the rating.

Musically this album conforms into what is generally known as the brutal death metal genre, which means that they are brutal to their instruments and vocal chords. The instrumentation is an assault on the instruments and the vocal works is just a garble of grunts and growls, kind of like a badger trying to scare the Jack Russell Terrier from its burrow. The production is in favour of making the music sound as aggressive as possible which makes it quite non-melodic, I would say that there are hardly anything that might be considered melodic in the music that Livarkahil has to offer on this album. According to my music player this album has eleven tracks and it takes just over 43 minutes to play the entire thing and as I said, it is impossible to make out what the vocalist is on about.

I can immediately state that I don’t think this is good, actually I do think this is really bad to be honest. Listening to this album is about as much fun and as hard as holding a normal sized car over your head, it also means that when you are done something will ache. In the case of Livarkahil it is the head that will ache, I cannot recall ever having as much migraine as when I was listening to this album for this review. There just isn’t much at all to really take to heart here, the music is just a lot of noise, the vocals reminds me of a badger defending its burrow or a pigsty, it sounds really bad. I would say that the overall sound is actually more or less like the cover art, dark grey. I am not impressed and when I see all these positive reviews for this album I am really puzzled, I cannot understand why anyone would think this is great music but I guess there are people who enjoy the great feeling of jumping down an active volcano or being in the middle of a nuclear explosion, each to his/her own I guess.

There are one or two things though that are actually alright but it is mainly a good way to sell painkillers as the headache it creates is probably universal. Sure you can say that I don’t understand brutal death metal or primitive black metal and you be right in that assumption as well, for me it is just a racket of instrumental noise and nothing else and it is monotone and also really bad. Sure there are one or two bands in these genres that are more fun than leukaemia but most of the bands are not and Livarkahil are definitely not.

In the end I would say that it is better to have leukemia than listening to this album and also that I’d much rather eat my thesaurus than listening to this album again and I am very fond of my thesaurus so I’d rather not. Therefore the next stop for this album is the toilet.

HHHHHHH

Livarkahil Signs of Decay

Livarkahil
Signs of Decay