Carnifex
Dead in My Arms

Being original and personal in such a conservative and repetitive field as brutal death (or deathcore, since there is no genre without the suffix -core anymore) is certainly not easy. With rare exceptions, the risk of copying the pillars of the genre is very high, both musically and lyrically, and this is why the modern extreme scene presents a myriad of bands that are replicas of each other, adding nothing new and flooding the music market with releases that lack punch, last 2-3 listens, and end up directly in the trash.

Unfortunately, the Californians Carnifex do not escape this negative trend. Active since 2005 and quickly labeled as one of the leading bands of deathcore (that is, a mix of brutal death and cadenced mosh breaks), they debuted in 2007 with this "Dead In My Arms", preceded only by a couple of demos. An album which, as you may have already guessed from the beginning of the review, is absolutely negligible.

The band operates on a track already tested by groups like Job For A Cowboy, Despised Icon, Dying Fetus, and Skinless: downtuned guitars, distorted and heavy as boulders, tight drumming between blast-beat assaults, thrash accelerations, double bass at will, and the usual indistinguishable mosh slowdowns, vocals alternating between standard growl and scream lacking personality.

It doesn't take many listens to realize that the main flaw of the album is the repetitiveness of the tracks: the structures are always the same, predictable and eventually trivial and boring, guitar riffs all alike as if they had done copy and paste for all 10 tracks. Were it not for the titles on the back of the album, it would be impossible to distinguish one piece from another, and the feeling will be that of listening to the same song ten times.

The only noteworthy track, in the end, remains the opener "Slit Wrist Savior", the only one with enough catchy passages that can be enjoyed repeatedly. The rest of the album follows the same path, but with much less creativity and feeling.

I really don't know whom to sincerely recommend this album to, and in fact, I can't understand how modern generations of metalheads praise bands like Carnifex and neglect much more interesting and surely more personal acts. According to the humble opinion of the writer, deathcore is a genre destined to die quickly, a temporary trend that has produced only a sea of banal, trivial, and, in one word, ugly records (with some exceptions, naturally) and will disappear as quickly as it was born.

In short, if you are not addicted to the various Job for a Cowboy, Despised Icon, Animosity, and the other 3000 names I surely can't remember at the moment, move on, you'd only be wasting half an hour uselessly.