Looking at the album cover of Rhode Island-based extreme metallers Anoxia‘s Intense Killings, I couldn’t clearly picture in my head what their music must sound like. Often times, brutal death metal bands will have a Jonzig cover, goregrind bands will have pictures of corpses they found on the web, porngrind bands will have pictures of porn they found on the web, and Cookie Monster albums will have cookies on the cover. The cover of Intense Killings goes against all of the norms; there are no corpses, no titties, no cookies, just a chalk drawing of a man with a hat walking through water, beneath a bridge, at dusk, or dawn, with a knife in one hand and a bag in another, with a smokestack in the background. Of all of the album covers I’ve ever seen, that’s definitely one of the most cryptive, and most difficult to decipher, based upon the artwork, what the music must sound like. I mean, a guy under a bridge with a knife and a bag, what is he doing? Is he dragging a dead body around, or is he merely fishing with a knife? Fishing with a knife would be pretty brutal, though fishing itself doesn’t seem like a very brutal thing to be singing about. Is the thing in his hand even a knife? It seems too big to be a knife, it could be a stick, perhaps a snapped off part of his boat. Perhaps he was a fisherman, whose boat went ashore and shattered against the rocks, so he had to carry his catch back to his truck, and carried the piece of wood as a souvenir of his boat that once was. Maybe the piece of wood is actually lodged through his body, and he’s trying desperately to make it back to the road where someone will hopefully drive past and save him. Maybe the object in the water is actually a sea creature that he’s hunting, he can’t see it, but he has his knife by his side, ready to strike, but he doesn’t see the creature as it lunges for him. Maybe he’s just a scarecrow for the ocean, to scare away the fish, perhaps placed there by a mentally retarded farmer. Maybe it’s not even a he, maybe it’s a she! What if it’s an alien, sent from another world? What if… oh yea, this is supposed to be a CD review. Umm… this is some brutal stuff, brutal distorted stuff, the vocals are hard to comprehend, sounds like static, the music is, and umm… you know what? Talking about the album cover was way more fun than listening to the music. Actually, I got bored midway through the second song and threw the CD somewhere, I’m not sure where, but I heard it go *Thwack!* so it must have hit something solid, maybe the wall… no, no marks on the wall… hmm… well then, this will forever remain a myster… oh wait, no, it hit the door, there’s a little ding where it hit or maybe that was there before? Hmm… actually, I lied, I never even bothered listening to it. Its Rhode Island brutal death metal with a shitty album cover, that many people already told me completely fucking sucks, so, really how good could it be? I did throw it at the door, however. At least the *Thwack!* sounded pretty cool.

Review byTeufel