Ugh...
Seriously, this lone word sums up this album-no no, this band, better than any other possible description. That being said, this one is still a bit difficult to approach. Despite the review's title being very reflective of these guys and their persona, I still had very high hopes for the follow-up to the monumental masterpiece known as Trivmvirate (the pointless remake of the preceding album, the name I can't even remember it's that forgettable, doesn't count). Still, not surprising that a band such as TMDC, who are as arrogant as they come, would drop to this level of mediocre quality topped off with an ego the size of a galaxy. All in all, the band has become more or less a joke, almost to the point of being a parody of themselves if not for the few remnants of remarkable glory from earlier days.
Now, this album isn't necessarily bad from an intensity aspect. It actually has some rather ground-shaking moments and does succeed in matching the vigor of its predecessor in a few areas. Songs like "God Amongst Insects" and "Qasr Al-Niyaha" still retain a very nasty, war-like bite but nothing as earth shattering as the likes of "Master of the Bryansk Forest" or "Deus Ex Machina". Robin Kok's voice has not lost any of its fierceness and the delivery is still superb. It's mostly the instrumentation that has become a joke. Seriously, there is not a single memorable riff on this entire album. Even through some of the album's better songs such as "God Amongst Insects" or "Svpreme Avant-Garde Death Metal" (cute title, dickweeds), are not worthy of any sort of merit. The riffs have gone from being absolute massive, tremor-inducing behemoths to mundane, mid tempo chugging with little substance. "Human Wave Attack" probably being the best example here as that song is absolutely loaded with down tuned chugs with no actual life to any of the riffs. The sad part is the potential is there throughout many of these songs. Again, see "S.A.D.M.'s" ending or "Drugs, Thugs, and Machetes", the latter beginning with a very brisk, rumbling bass piece with a nice electronic sample that unfortunately delves off into a bland, anti-climatic riff. What happened to the thunderous intros, the hordes of pummeling riffs, the bombastic solos? Apparently TMDC decided more samples, boring, sterile leads, and dry riffwork, that manages to make At the Gate of Sethu seem memorable and full of vitality, was more important.
Speaking of samples, there's too damn many and I don't like it. It's pretty hard to distinguish whether or not this is reflective of these guys trying too damn hard or not trying at all. However, knowing TMDC's persona, I'd say the latter is the case. They had no problem getting it right on the predecessor, which contained an excellent variety of electronic sequences lightly layered over the thick riffing and thunderous drums. Now, in the case of Tetragrammaton, it's like dumping a pile of dogshit onto a decaying corpse. Between the mechanical chanting, that I guess is supposed to sound massive and frightening, and that god awful, irritating movie soundtrack guy's "ominous" spoken word sections that somehow manage to be worse than that of Aaron Stainthorpe, the samples and electronic bits have taken a massive turn for the worse. Seriously, who is this movie soundtrack dude? Where did he come from? Why does he exist in this? Here I am trying my best to enjoy "S.A.D.M." and out of nowhere comes this jerkoff's interlude that contains nothing more than some stupid "Ha-ha the human race will bow to their new gods" pretentiousness that serves absolutely no purpose on this album. It reminds me of those retarded rappers that feel the need to list off a totally random assortment of names and the stereotypical buzzwords like "shawty" and "holla" at the beginning of all their songs. Overall, the samples, electronics, and movie soundtrack jargon seem like a compensation of sorts for lack of fucks given regarding other aspects of the album. And what is up with "Todesnacht von Stammheim"? I guess it's supposed to be this album's "Kindertodeslied", which wasn't particularly good in it's own right, yet this song manages to insult it. It's mostly just loaded with disjointed samples, plain riffing, and probably the only point in this album where I'd say the vocals lack vigor and are a weak spot. At least "Kindertodeslied" has its interesting moments. This is just plain unnecessary.
Sjoerd Visch's drumming gets the job done but seems to be a lot more restrained and generic compared to his work on earlier releases. None of his work on this album matches the creative, explosive work we heard in songs like "Wrath of the Ba'ath" or "I Spew Thee Out Of My Mouth". It's mostly just standard patterns with a fill here and there with the bass being virtually non-existent. Despite the half-hearted instrumentation, the album does manage to conjure up the odd towering atmosphere such as "S.A.D.M" and "Qasr Al-Niyaha"'s endings as well as the opener which is probably the only highlight of this album, it largely fails to impress and seems entirely faux in comparison to Trivmvirate. Despite how much I'm drawing back to their past efforts, it's really hard to avoid. Tetragrammaton basically just does everything wrong that Trivmvirate did right.
This was a huge disappointment to say the least. This album was no attempt at innovation, progression, it wasn't even a tried and true attempt at the original sound. It's essentially just a band becoming so full of themselves based on past merits and writing a half-assed, apathetic attempt at a follow-up to an absolute masterpiece. Sometimes you just end up falling into the hype. At first, the lyrical concepts seemed cool, the first song they released seemed cool, everything down to the artwork seemed pretty cool, and then the album was actually released...*sigh*. Sometimes, The Monolith Deathcult just like to play asshole, and you know what? That's just life.
Fuckers.
36/100
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