Just to make things clear, this is not Damnation from Poland and this is not Damnation from Sweden. This is not Damnation from Virginia, Damnation AD, Damnation from Quebec or any other band with the words ‘damn,’ ‘nation’ and/or ‘damnation’ in their name. This is the San Diego-area Damnation. Granted, more people will be familiar with either the Swedish or Polish Damnations since those bands have been on actual labels and all, but that’s just me drawing out a joke about the generic nature of the band’s name. I mean, really, Damnation? You couldn’t put a number and/or random words around the name or something? "Exploding Damnation of Guttural Echidnae" would look better on a T-shirt.

The backstory here is that this is an album that was worked on for eleven years, as explained in the liner notes to Spineless Skies. I don’t understand why the liner notes are even there. In all honesty I don’t care since I’d never heard of this Damnation until receiving Spineless Skies from Teufel. The poor-to-fair artwork, the liner notes and the liberal use of lime green don’t make for an appealing package.

Damnation seem to be going for a cross between technical death a la Suffocation, Pyaemia and the like and the more basic approach of bands like Drawn and Quartered (the latter quality isn’t surprising since Damnation have been around since 1990.) The musicianship is much better and tighter than I expected and the drumming of Marion Matthew in particular is notable enough. At the same time, the production on Spineless Skies is tinny and of demo quality. More importantly, there are no real memorable songs on this album. I appreciate Damnation’s stand against adversity but fuck, eleven years to put this out? Still, Damnation got Spineless Skies out there and the album isn’t bad at all musically, so good on them for that.

The instrumental tracks/"soundscapes" aside from "Ancient Vortex 1111" (which is a decently-realized mellow passage to wind down Spineless Skies) detract quite a bit from Spineless Skies‘ overall impact. "Reverse Me" in particular is awful - it sounds like a minute of reversed bar-room chatter. If that’s all it takes to do a "soundscape" I’ll just record a minute of Family Guy through a computer microphone, put it through echo and reverb effects, reverse the .wav file and call it "Psychological Petardation of Mr. Griffin." The soundscapes come across as filler and Damnation can afford to do without them.

Damnation have a new album in the pipeline for later in 2007 according to their MySpace page, and their stuff is good enough to be at least on a small label. I appreciate Damnation’s tenacity but they need to up the professionalism with their newest release, both in the production and with the album artwork. Also, find a layout and colour scheme that doesn’t try to rape my eyes.

Written By: The Ultimate Mark