Beneath the Masacre
Evidence of Inequity
Galy
Greetings from the Great Black North
Sometimes you can judge an album by its cover. A statuesque woman reflected in a babyface mask, warehouse workers constructing warheads and a blue-collar hammer-and-cogs logo all grace the busy-for-busy’s-sake front of Beneath the Massacre’s debut EP, Evidence of Inequity. While the painting’s warm colors and “composition” (complex imagery being processed into something simple, yet nuanced) symbolize a sort of working man’s desperation during wartime, the Montreal group’s music seems too technical to be average, yet too common to be deep.
None of these five songs cracks the four-minute mark, but their seasoned, compacted intricacy makes them seem epic. The quizzically titled “Comforting Prejudice” kicks things off with wheedly-wheedly-whee guitarisms and polyrhythmic blast beats, while singer Elliot Desgagnés grunts incoherently. The band is noticeably indebted to Québécois scene-starters Cryptopsy, especially in their conviction, but even that influence is sometimes lost amidst the Dillingeresque soloing. “Never More” alternates between solo-riff-solo verses and a sludgy, almost Crowbar-like chorus encased by locomotive drums and bubbling, harmonized bass melodies.
For a band that formed in the summer of 2004, however, Beneath the Massacre have a well-conceived vision of who they are: guitars must shred, drums must rumble and Desgagnés must puke up more green paste than Linda Blair in The Exorcist. No wonder Despised Icon recently asked guitarist Chris Bradley to tour with them. Throughout the disc, everything is brimming to explode, which hopefully means the band’s next album will push them over the edge.
—Kory Grow
