Review Summary: Massive Killing Capacity is a heavy death-metal album from Dismember. It is heavy but it might be a bit sloppy compared to other Dismember albums. A good place to start if you want a soft start if you are interested to get into the Dismember's music.
You could almost say that nearly any sort of extreme metal came from the U.S. Thrash metal really exploded during the eighties and later the rise of death metal came to birth. Classic death metal bands such as
Morbid Angel,
Possessed and
Death alongside many other bands introduced the world to a new shape of metal. Alongside America Sweden has also been one of the leading countries to export high quality death metal.
Dismember and
Entombed were two bands who shaped the first wave of prime death metal in Sweden.
Dismember has been around for a very long time now, created back in 1988 the band has succeeded to keep their music pretty much untouched from other musical influences. Melodies has still managed to crawl into
Dismember’s sound but that doesn’t mean that this band is labbelled as a melodic death-metal. This does not sound like
In Flames though,
Dismember is basic death metal. Very heavy, intense, very aggressive, lyrics based on death, gore, war and violence.
Massive Killing Capacity was released in 1995 and it is
Dismember’s third full-length release. Once again it was the album cover that sparked an interest in me and I wanted to hear it, it wasen’t meant that I wanted to find this in the first place. I was looking for their newest album called
The God That Never Was but after I looked at the album cover I wondered if the music was just as massive as this huge armoured berserking war machine. I was quite surprised and somewhat disappointed when I was listening to it, it didn’t felt as energetic as I thought it could’ve been. It was more like heavy death metal since the songs were pretty calm because of the simplistic and half-catchy drum work. Anyway, this album has great songs; most of them are very heavy and has a time limit of 2:30 minutes up to 3:00 minutes which is perfect. Only three tracks were longer than three minutes, this makes the songs easy to endure and you can digest the songs quick and decide if they were good or not. This is a good death metal concoction with some melodies thrown in here and there, especially in the guitar solos.
There were five crew members who created this album,
Matti Karki is a pretty good death vocalist but he doesn’t make it through my own demands for being a great vocalist. He still has a good death voice; his semi-choked harsh vocal style adds a fine texture to the half messy and raw sound.
David Blomqvist and
Robert Senneback does a good job with the guitars, I can’t say that this a superb performance. The guitars are heavy and have a very good variety in terms of riffs and solos. Fast shredding, tremolo riffing and heavier catchier riffs are often played and they are mixed well. You can hear some melodic tunes are blended in the riff lines a little now and then while the guitar solos has plenty of melodic moments.
Robert Cabeza march on with his bass providing a good sound to back up the guitars, hardly any standouts since the bass is pretty much stuck in the rhythm sections.
Fred Estby does not impress you with his drumming, instead of rapid firing beats he takes on a more hard rock directed path of drumming. There are some good mid-paced drum patterns during some songs that give you a feel of ordinary death metal.
Surprised and disappointed, I thought that this was going to be very intense as death metal often is performed but this felt a bit calmer, perhaps sloppy but in a good way. There was good stuff here, with these calm less-intense drum parts the music became more endurable and I enjoyed it pretty much. There was quite many moments where I thought the songs were catchy and heavy at the same time, another thing was that it was a good overall variety because it didn’t really felt so repetitive. The half messy but yet heavy sound give the album an old-school atmosphere, but this sound does not hold up so good in comparison to other metal bands today. The use of melody was used in a good way, melodies were only used in large amounts during the solos and not in the actual guitar work and this gave the songs good depth and structure. If I would point out some of the bad stuff then I would say that this felt a bit like
Entombed material. Every time I have heard
Entombed material it has always been heavy but slow songs, this album reminded me of
Entombed and their style which was or is called ‘’death ‘n’ roll’’ or death rock. If the band had but out a bit more energy in this album would’ve been a great thing because this album will get boring due to the slow song patterns.
A good death metal album but it had unfortunately some flaws that didn’t work out to good for me. Some tracks became quick favourites of mine,
Massive Killing Capacity,
On Frozen Fields and
To The Bone are some of my absolute favourites from this album.
Collection By Blood,
Life, Another Shape Of Sorrow and the instrumental
Nenia created a good atmosphere because of their more melodic approaches, unfortunately most of the songs were neither too bad or too good, they felt just uninteresting to me. Death metal people must have experienced
Dismember’s music because it is one of few bands that I think has at least a unique sound of their own. If you like Scandinavian extreme metal than you have to check this band out. This album perhaps isen’t a good start to get into the band though, if you want a soft start then you should aim for this album. But if you want a faster and more brutal beginning then you should aim for
The God That Never Was or
Like An Ever Flowing Stream or perhaps
Pieces (which has one of the coolest album covers in death metal if you ask me).
Positives
+ Melodies has been used when necessary
+ Big selection of heavy riffs
+ Quite catchy material
+ A real mean album cover
Negatives
- Few real standout tracks
- A bit sloppy material compared to their other albums
- Bad energy level
- This will be boring with time
Recommended Tracks
-- Massive Killing Capacity
-- On Frozen Fields
-- To The Bone
-- Wardead
I was surprised and disappointed at the same time by this album, my choice of rating balances between a 2.5 and 3 but I will go with a 3/5 (good).
