I think this is supposed to sound grinding, heavy, and intimidating,but the latest from Chondritic Sound's founder sounds more like a blastof dense, hot air than anything else. This single, 42 minute trackfluctuates between a frustrating stasis and short, intense barrages ofmachine noise and static. The bass-like rumble that stays through theentire album undergoes a series of modulations that becomes thicker andthicker while waves of bees, never-ending crunches, and low-endfrequencies boil over one another in an almost indistinguishable haze.Eventually Death Tonebegins to sound as though it is going nowhere and by the end of thealbum I feel as if I've been run in tiny and completely uninterestingcircles for far too long. There's no doubt that the album is incrediblyloud, but it isn't punishing or particularly noteworthy in itsseverity. With a title like Death Tone that's a bitdisappointing, especially considering the label Hive Mind released thison and the lack of any discernable arrangement other than the shifts intexture that so gradually occur. The constant cycle of homogenouselements doesn't allow for any shocking moments or unpredictable blastsof sound and it especially doesn't allow for any interestingdevelopments. Roughly ten minutes of listening to this would have beenenough to let me know what was going to happen throughout the rest ofthe record; an entire 30 minutes or so is wasted repeating andrehashing what was accomplished very early on. To make matters worse,the jumble of fuzzy waves that make up this album eventually begin toblend into the background and disappear altogether. Instead of soundinglike a confrontation with something deadly or even scary, the musicslowly becomes benign and altogether easy to listen to. I expectedsomething confrontational and demented, but received a poorlyconstructed and disengaging soundscape. Louder, far more deadly havocexists out in the realm of noise; the name and vaguely anti-musicalsentiments of Death Tone aren't enough to make a bland and redundant recording exciting or horror-inducing. samples:
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