UMUR "As Humanity Fades" is the 2nd full-length studio album by US death metal act Morta Skuld. The album was released in 1994 by Deaf Records/ Peaceville Records. Morta Skuld introduced themselves to the world with the "Dying Remains (1993)" debut album, which is a pretty standard US death metal release. I´d actually go as far as to call it mediocre and unremarkable.

...unfortunately things haven´t changed much on "As Humanity Fades". Morta Skuld still play some really standard US death metal. The pace is mostly kept heavy and mid-paced with a couple of faster parts thrown in for good measure. The doomy slow pace and haunting Paradise Lost (early) inspired leads from the debut are not a part of the band´s sound anymore. The vocals are brutal and mostly indecipherable growls. The vocals are not bad, but they soon become monotone. I miss passion and bite. The worst sinner here are the songs themselves though. After a couple of tracks it all becomes a monotone blur. There are no hooks to hold on to and the songs are forgotten as soon as they are over. If the band had chosen to include more memorable ideas like they do in the track "Different Breeds", where they include some nice short acoustic breaks I think the album as a whole would have been much more entertaining. The fact that "As Humanity Fades" is 50:18 minutes long, doesn´t exactly help either. That´s way too long for a death metal release when you don´t vary your music more than Morta Skuld do.

The production lacks a bit of punch, the musicianship is solid but not outstanding and as mentioned the tracks lack memorable moments, so all in all "As Humanity Fades" is a fairly standard product. I had really hoped that Morta Skuld had stepped up from the mediocre debut but I guess my hopes were set too high. I´ll rate this one somewhere between 2.5 - 3 stars.

Time Signature Paradise of the metal...

Genre: death metal

Do you like your death metal old school? Then this release by Morta Skuld is the perfect choice for you. It is just about as old school as it gets, and, what's more, it was released in 1994, smack in the middle of the death metal heyday of the 1990s.

The music on this release basically combines the heaviness of Bolt Thrower, the crushing sound of Obituary and the level of technicality and sense of variation of "Spiritual Healing" and "Leprosy" era Death. The sound slike generic 90s death metal, you say? Well, I like to think of this release as capturing all the good things from 90s death metal without actually sounding generic or like the many rip-off acts of the era.

There are a lot of heavy parts and crushing riffs on this album, and even some groove too, and while there are thrash metal polka beats, the blast beats associated with modern death metal are absent - and I appreciate that - not that I dislike blastbeats or anything, I just appreciate a band that focuses on heaviness, riffage and breakdowns (but not in the way that has become popular in modern deathcore, I should act) rather than speed all time, and I've always been of the opinion that music can be brutal without being fast, and there certainly is a lot of brutality to this album. The bass may have a funny clunky sound, but I actually like how the bass has a prominent sound, and the band also utilize the bass very well, making use of bass-filled breaks and bass-drum parts to great effect.

I think that the vocals are perhaps a bit boring, and if there is anything generic about this release it's the vocals which are just standard growling. That being said, there is a certain rhytmicality to the vocals, which serves to remind that in death metal, the vocals are more of an almost percussive instrument than a tonal one.

In all, this is - or should have been - a death metal classic, which I think appeals to all fans of good old 90s death metal.