Immolated moTh is a solo project from an English guy called Thom (hence the nameplay). 'Pain' is his debut full-length work, after 2016 EP 'This Broken Mind'. Happy titles, right? There is no lack of plausibility in Thom's output, as he is seriously ill with fibromyalgia, causing him to be in constant pain. "Turn your pain into art,” as the saying goes.

Thom has a history for playing various music styles, including blues, hardcore and hip-hop. While all of this is not audible here, the hardcore roots are in, for sure, and it can be heard right on start, but Thom chose death metal as his channelling. Most suitable. IM's music is certainly not easy for a listener to delve into. This is totally devoid of anything beautiful and pleasant. Well, death metal was meant to be so, but we all know the story... Everything was done by Thom himself. Sometimes it took a long time for him to complete a single song, because of his illness worsened at times. I do not disrespect his creations because of that fact.

"Carefully constructed brutal fucking chaos" is the term used for IM's music. While I would not call this avant-garde, this does contain some unconventional songwriting. The vocals are low throaty grunting with some distortion and/or effect, sounding like a zombie uttering. The words are unrecognizable for me. The guitar playing is made of rugged and discordant tremolo picking and leads, and insane fretboard freak out; they make Slayer's solos sound hit music! Power chords aren't played a lot. There are a few melody structures heard. The guitar is not played all the time. Therefore the bass guitar has a big and important role. It souns like Les Claypool (Primus) was mucking about with a fretless bass, strumming some more or less random stuff. Or then it's rumbling and simplistic. While the drums sound like machine-generated, there's quite a lot of dyssynchrony in beats. I mean, 'Insidious...' does contain some inhumanly fast double kick drumming, so maybe both are utilized, acoustic drums and a drum machine. Most of the songs carry industrial vibe. Tempos vary from blastbeats to slow ones, the vibes from chaotic to doomy, and from ominous to repugnant.

The compositions are longish (one song being 5 minutes, and the rest clocking 6½ - close to 8 minutes in length), and while there are a few parts in each, they tend to stuck, or then there is not much interesting things happening. One big con is that the songs aren't memorable. As I mentioned, this is far, far from listener-friendly stuff, and not only sound-wise. The production is quite good for a home-made output; This contains surprisingly hefty lower frequencies.

As for musical pleasure, I cannot find any here. I tried to mind and listen to this as a work caused by real suffering. Still, it only made me annoyed. That's why I did not score: Respecting the effort, but it is not for me. 'Pain' is no meat and potatoes, but too exotic and odd, but also loaded with a lot of misfortune.

Reviewed by Lane
11/19/2018 18:26