My, how the mighty have fallen. After listening to Massachusetts’ Scattered Remnants‘ first two demo EPs Procreating Mass Carnage and Inherent Perversion, I was expecting something phenomenal from this brutal quintet, unfortunately, their current (and most likely last) release Destined To Fail did not live up to those expectations. The music of their latest release is still very heavy and crushing, unfortunately, it’s also extremely monotonous and lacks variety. Opening this CD is a typical death metal intro from some horror flick, I swear if I hear another one of these I’m going to act out one of the scenes from these movies on the band… anyway, the title track is crushing brutal death metal with studio tricked double vocals. The first four tracks are basically one long monotonous song, the beats of session drummer Dan Egan are extremely repetitive, I personally think the band would have been better off just using a drum machine, at least with a drum machine they could put some variation to some of the beats. The fifth track, "As Whores", is a rather melodic track using doom-goth movie music with some minor guitar strumming. This track really makes no sense to me and sounds like nothing more than a filler to get the CD to at least reach the 30mins mark. "Angelic Redemption" uses some female vocals which again adds a doom feel to the brutal music. "Virtuous Abandonment" is a slow power groove track which also has no place on this CD. The most disappointing song on the entire album is the re-recording of "Vaginal Vomit". I honestly don’t understand the reasoning behind re-recording it. The re-recording is HORRIBLE. They completely butchered one of my favorite brutal death metal tracks leaving me open mouthed and completely in shock. Don’t get me wrong, Scattered Remnants are far from being a bad band, anyone who has heard their first two EPs knows what I’m talking about, however, Destined To Fail just does not even come close to matching up with their prior releases, they’ve slipped to becoming nothing more than a third rate Suffocation clone, maybe that’s why they’ve decided to retire after 6 years, and maybe it’s best that they did.

(A few months later): Upon listening to this CD again recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that this album isn’t as bad a release as I’d portrayed in my review. It’s certainly not their best material, but it’s better than the majority of the material being recorded by so-called brutal death metal acts. I’d still recommend picking up Inherent Perversion over this one, however.

Written By: Teufel