Despite being one of the more successful and popular metal acts, and one of Metal Blade Records’ top sellers, I hadn’t bothered to listen to Michigan’s The Black Dahlia Murder prior to reviewing this, their most recent full length offering, 2009’s Deflorate. While I was aware of the band’s existence, I was also very aware of the vast number of horrible bands who have been influenced by, or whose press releases claim to sound very much like, The Black Dahlia Murder. If that many shitty bands “sound like” The Black Dahlia Murder, putting two and two together, I came to the conclusion that The Black Dahlia Murder must really fucking suck, and never bothered subjecting myself to the aural atrocity that must be their music.

It wasn’t until Metal Blade Records put me back on their press list earlier this year that I decided to finally give the band a listen. Since I was wrong about Goatwhore sucking, I figured there might actually be a chance I was wrong about The Black Dahlia Murder too.

Nope.

To be fair, my expectations for The Black Dahlia Murder were extremely low and, honestly, they’re actually a lot better than I was expecting. Based on things I’d heard I was expecting the band to be a direct, and very shit, At The Gates clone, but that wasn’t really what I’d found while listening to Deflorate.

The Black Dahlia Murder play a hybrid style of blackened melodic death metal fused with metalcore. The tracks generally tend to be very aggressive and high tempo, which is pretty much the exact opposite of traditional melodic death metal, whose songs aren’t very abrasive with a mid tempo approach. In fact, the approach The Black Dahlia Murder take is more heavily rooted in metalcore, with an emphasis on chuggy riffs and choppy time patterns. The drumming is especially non-black metal, with Shannon Lucas, with kit triggered to the tits, chop-blasting his way through the entire album.

The riffing of Brian Eschbach and Arsis‘ Ryan Knight alternates between chuggy metalcore riffing, and At The Gates-style gentle melody. It’s an odd combination that actually doesn’t sound out of place, but really isn’t that appealing to my ears. Despite obvious skilled displayed by the two, and bassist Bart Williams, the songwriting itself isn’t very unique or interesting. Take an At The Gates song, take a metalcore song, fuse them together and there you have a The Black Dahlia Murder song. Repeat it 10 times and you’ve got Deflorate.

The vocals are split pretty evenly between black metal screeching and deathcore barking, both of which fucking suck. Deathcore barking sucked 10 years ago and the fact bands still think it’s cool and use it today only helps reinforce my opinion that the youth of today are even stupider and have shittier taste than my generation. That said, the barking does fit the style of music the band plays, the black metal wailing, sounds really out of place and is both annoying and terrible.

While the music of The Black Dahlia Murder is loud, fast, angry and aggressive, it’s not intimidating. It’s like listening to a toddler having a fit. It’s cute and funny and you just feel like mocking them and egging them on, but you know full well if they try to start some shit you can easily knock them to the ground, grab them by the wrists and slap them in the face with their own fists while they weep openly while you mockingly chant “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”

If you’re aged 14-20 and are very inexperienced in metal, then this is something that will surely appeal to you. If you’re older than 20 and listen to this and enjoy it, you clearly need to be punched in the face for allowing your taste in music to be decided for you by what’s popular among kids not old enough to have hair on their balls. There are thousands of bands out there whose music is infinitely heavier, faster, more aggressive, more technically proficient and violent than this and seek them out. If The Black Dahlia Murder is the most intense thing you listen to, you are a complete failure as a metal fan. Fucking kids these days…

Review byTeufel