Time Signature Retribution in gore...

Genre: brutal death metal

With a band name like In Utero Cannibalism and an album title like "Sick" you may expect brutal death metal from the third full-length by the Greek metallers IUC (as they're also called)...

... and that's exactly what you get. This album offers fierce, no nonsense, brutal death metal from beginning to end, complete with gory and misanthropic lyrics, blastbeats galore, and sampled . True to the genre, each song is a frenzied and, to the uninitiated, bewildering onslaught of brutal riffs, semi-technical playing, and aggressive death grunts. That is, there are plenty of changes, shifts and changes, and a multiplicity of passages of various degrees of extremity.

Just the way brutal death metal is supposed to be.

Of course, the seasoned listener will be able to appreciate the advanced level of musicianship and precision in performance thus type of music requires. However, there is not a lot of originality in on the album which mostly takes its cues from the giants in the genre. This is not to belittle the music on "Sick", which definitely is of high quality, and which most fans of brutal death metal will be able to appreciate. But we are not dealing with a groundbreaking album here in any way.

The music is generally enjoyable to me, and the production is overall nice and brutal. But the shard sound of the snare drum is hugely annoying to my ears, and, whenever I listen to the album, it takes a couple of songs for my ears to attune to the snare drum.

Overall, this is a solid brutal death metal album which sounds the way brutal death metal should sound.