FREELOADER: MORTIFEROUS SCORN’S MASOCHISTIC THERAPY

Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out Mortiferous Scorn’s Masochistic Therapy.

I feel for the one-man death metal project, I really do. In addition to the logistical difficulties of touring, a one-man DM act has no bandmates with which to pound beers and nobody else to contribute sick riffs. The one-man black metal project works because the isolation of the music is often the point. Death metal, on the other hand, is a music of power and outward force. And while death metal tends to prize the power of the individual, you can’t fight the facts: more people = more force.

And so it follows that part of the work of a one-man DM band is to sound as little like a one-man DM band as possible. Such self-annihilation used to be impossible when drum machines still sounded like drum machines. Nowadays, solitary standard-bearers like Putrid Pile and Insidious Decrepancy can do a credible imitation of a full band. They work because their music is fully-formed enough, their ferocity direct enough, to overcome both the synthetic edges of their drum machines and the inherently silly image of a single guy playing four instruments simultaneously.

Since 2007, Madrid, Iowa’s Alexander Oden has pumped out an album a year as Mortiferous Scorn, all by himself. His second offering, The Perfect Impurity, was a great example of how to do it right – powerful riffs with just a whiff of the baroque around the edges, layered vocals, an unembarrassing drum machine and burly production that didn’t sanitize the sound to the point that it sounded like the studio product that it clearly was.

Something happened between then and 2010’s Masochistic Therapy, and it ain’t all good. As Oden’s songwriting has become more varied, his arrangements more layered, his music has gotten blander. The man can write a solid riff, but tracks like “Wretched Device” and “Subliminal Retribution” are all bang-by-numbers, saddled with frustratingly simple licks and refrains repeated four times (or multiples thereof). Oden once had a formidable growl, but his vocals on many of these songs recall Nathan Explosion’s cartoonish death-whisper from Metalocalypse. The less said about his deathly spoken word on “Reign of Deception” and “Fragile,” the better.

Moodier numbers like “Synthetic Existence” and “The Hand of God” unfurl in less-obvious ways. You can hear the spittle fly in the latter, as Oden growls a cappella: “Can’t you hear the screams / Can’t you feel the mass infection? / Cancer in the flock / Every moral’s been forsaken.” It’s my favorite moment on the album, because it’s so jarringly direct. It’s a huge contrast with the stiffness of much of the rest of Masochistic Therapy.

This is by no means an awful record. It just sounds like it was made in isolation, without any outside input regarding the songs or production, and that’s definitely a mood-killer for your average one-man band. Granted, there are plenty of full bands that settle for ho-hum riffing and bone-dry production, like we hear on Masochistic Therapy. But Oden’s made much fuller albums in the past. He knows how to write and record a great death metal record by himself. This time around, he just didn’t.

(2.5 horns up out of 5)

-SR

Download Masochistic Therapy (and every other Mortiferous Scorn album) for free here.