Disembowelment - Transcendence into the Peripheral

Transcendence into the Peripheral is one of those albums that I've been hearing about for years and periodically picked up and thought about buying whenever I was in a store.  It was released in 1993, basically the golden year of death metal, and came out on Relapse back when virtually everything they released was cool (as opposed to now, where it's all trendy sludge metal with the token generic deathgrind band).  I've always heard it described as a classic.  Disembowelment is one of these bands who are popular enough that most people know of them, but obscure enough that you get some points if you name drop it.  Basically I was positive that this album would be awesome.

Well, listening to this I think I can see why it has some cult status, but I can also see why it wasn't legitimately popular.  Disembowelment was a band that seemed to have a fair amount of creativity and obviously had a good idea of the general sound and atmosphere they wanted to create.  The music is mostly crushingly slow, doomy death metal with the occasional grinding section thrown in.  This is interspersed with melodic, effects laden guitar lines giving the whole doomy affair a transcendent quality (OK, I went there).  

This can be kind of a challenging listen since a good portion of the album is painfully slow (particularly "A Burial at Ornans"), and because of that I still don't know if something about the music will click as I keep listening to it.  But as of now, I can say that while the band has a fairly distinct and deliciously heavy old-school sound, some of the execution seems a bit lacking.  For one thing, the actual death and doom riffs are fairly generic.  The clean guitar work seems to make the songs more interesting, but when you listen to what's actually being played, it's generally a simple melodic line repeated over and over.  

As for the drumming, none of it sounds particularly proficient either.  However, I happen to be a firm believer in the idea that a bit of slop in the drumming can be beneficial for certain more visceral types of death or black metal.  Take the most doomy sections of Transcendence.  The drumming sounds positively lethargic, which is exactly what the music requires.  I wonder if a highly trained drummer would even be capable of playing such parts.  It seems like the temptation to throw in something technical or musically interesting would be too great.  And if Disembowelment succeeds at cultivating any sort of atmosphere with their music, it's one that would be destroyed by a jazzy fill.

At the end of the day, I like the sound these guys create, but it can't completely hold my interest.  I know I complained about the simplicity of some of the guitar lines, but I think if the overall package was drawing me in I could easily ignore these things - it's not as if simplicity is bad in and of itself.  It just may be that I'm not enough of a doom fan to fully appreciate this at the moment.  Time will tell.