Coffin Shaker: Malevolent Creation - Invidious Dominion

I wanted to write about the new album Dead Man’s Path, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. A decent idea then, I thought, would be to write about its predecessor.

Malevolent Creation is one of those bands whose name I’d always known but never gave much of a chance, having settled in my mind that they were just another one of the early New York/Florida death metal bands, but one that didn’t really need a whole lot of my attention. After all, I have my bases covered with all the others, so I should be good, right? I knew a guy who was always pimping The Ten Commandments, but I just never gave the band much of a chance. Envenomed from 2000 caught my attention, and I’d been sort of on and off with the band ever since. Maybe a year and a half ago I decided I was going to devote some time to the bands’ discography, and I’m rather happy that I did.

Invidious Dominion is a solid release, displaying most of the hallmark traits of Malevolent Creation. It is straight to the point, no bells and whistles death metal with a great grinding sound. Malevolent Creation sounds like a table saw or some other type of power tool, and that is a very welcome quality in music for me. That is something that I really love about the old school death metal bands and records, that buzzsaw guitar sound. It’s a clean sound as well, making it apparent that the band knows what they’re doing and they want it to be heard. All metal bands have benefit from improved recording and mixing techniques.

Drumming is solid, the riffs are interesting. Vocally, Malevolent is still doing the murder and violence thing, which is fine. It is nice to have some different death metal subject matter once in a while, and getting away from the standard gore/zombie thing is nice. The vocals have that kind of sing-songy delivery at times, which I think is a Malevolent Creation hallmark. I like the way they arrange the lyrics to rhyme at the end of all the chorus lines, regardless of how that may cause the actual lyric to become a little hokey. Take, for instance, the chorus of Compulsive Face Breaker: “Get back up, piece of shit/Again your face I want to hit.” A lyrical masterwork if ever there was one. I know that with the kind of lame, slam/core cover art that type of tough guy lyric may be expected, but Malevolent isn’t one of those bands.

I have a hard time saying anything critical about this album. It is good, solid death metal, nothing fancy or experimental, nothing different or new, nothing bland or boring despite being the norm from the band. It’s short, around 35 minutes, and that time flies by. A really satisfying listen in the way that most of the third tier death metal bands usually are, so if something like Monstrosity floats your boat, or if you like other Malevolent Creation records, you’ll probably enjoy this. I keep putting it on because while it may not be anything innovative or new, it has that enjoyable quality that keeps dragging me back to listen to tracks like Target Rich Environment, United Hate and Compulsive Face Breaker again and again.