Review Summary: A half hour of pain.
Music can be bad in so many ways; often, it's hard to discern when music has one awful element that brings the whole process down, or when the music is just bad in general. Listeners pray, hoping they will never hear something so shoddy, so sorrow inducing, that literally no aspect of it could be described as good. This type of musical "virginity" should be cherished. That is why I pray you never hear something as bad as
Svedhous'
Despair Poetry.
The only way to accurately describe the actual effect of this album is with a careful analogy. Imagine if someone decided that it would be a swell idea to bring a fire-axe down upon someone else's foot. The screech emitted would be of pure agony, and for many bystanders, painful just to listen to. Sometime during 2006,
Svedhous multi-instrumentalist G.H. decided he wanted everyone to hear just how awful that sounds by making a metal album so bad that it's actually painful to listen to.
Every annoying screech, every bland, agonizingly produced guitar line, everything about this album is bad. The guitars have absolutely no variation and often go on for half of a song's duration with absolutely no differentiation. The first track is literally composed of TWO riffs. Doomier/deppressive releases are not known for guitar virtuosity, but there's a fine line between careful, slow guitar playing and laziness. G.H. has decided to launch himself well over the line; every song sounds exactly the same, and not just because all the notes sound the same. The production is so bad that any semblance of melody that there may have been is lost in all the fuzzy noise. Tempos range from dully slow to a lackadaisical mid-pace riffing. What none of these tempos have is any interesting guitar-work.
The vocals take the 'deppressive' cake, however. Every single 'lyric', of which there are few, uttered on
Despair Poetry comes in a shrill, high pitched shriek-whine. Think Varg Vikernes, except without any of the focus and interesting backing musicianship that made it tolerable. I am truly unable to understand whether any actual words are uttered. Each and every screech sounds to be just that; a screech. G.H. literally sounds like he is screaming 'ow' every time he opens his mouth. Perhaps he brought a large bucket of bricks (of various sizes) to the recording studio with him, and just dropped them on his foot for 35 minutes. Variation in the vocals consists of how long G.H. squeals and how whiny he sounds when he does it. Sometimes, he sounds like he is in more pain; I’d wager those were the especially large bricks.
This is easily the worst thing I have ever heard. Stay well away. The music is probably described as "depressive" because it's just so bad.
