Forum.RttP{Review for ANOXIA - Intense Killings...}

This is from http://www.metalcoven.com and is riddled with mistakes that I told them about and I hope they will edit this review, but you get the overall about the CD at least, so here it is...

Reviewed - 04/22/05

ANOXIA
Intense Killings
[Pathos Productions]

Rhode Island? Rhode Island? I've heard of this place before. Isn't this where Foghorn Leghorn lives? I honestly had not even thought of Rhode Island in a few years and then in one week I hear of the place not once, but twice! First I get in a CD titled "Intense Killings" to review by a Rhode Island band called ANOXIA, then a day later Rhode Island makes national news when that dude kills a cop in a police station, jumps out a third story window and later is brought into court with a severely smashed, swelled and cut up face wearing a Hannibal The Cannibal style plastic mask. This apparently happened when his face met the ground after his swan dive to the street below. That, or the cops got a little payback for the asswipe shooting one of their colleagues. Anyway, the guys family went nuts as the guy just stood there trying to watch what was going on through his battered and puffed up eyes. The music ANOXIA has put down for their recording of "Intense Killings" is so suffocatingly intense and brutal that one may end up looking just like this cop killer after listening to it.

"Intense Killings" is for all practical purposes a totally guttural Death Metal band with some slight Grind overtones. And surprisingly, I love it! The main reason I like this so well is that the guitarist Dave Boccuzzi has come up with some interesting and hypnotizing hooks in his guitar work. There's not just power chord after power chord on this album because these neat little hooks happen quite often and take an album that may have been a bit dull without them and pushed it forward into the "pretty damn good" category. Sadly, upon researching the band for this review I found out that Dave Boccuzzi is no longer a part of ANOXIA. This sucks as not only are his guitar melodies / harmonies what made this album stand out, but he was the main lyric writer as well. The rest of the band seems to be full of great musicians as well. If I had to pick an outstanding musician aside from Dave, it would be bassist Chris McCarthy who has some excellent and fast basswork on parts of this album. Brutal as hell at all times, the respectable number of tempo changes assure that the listener will never become discontent. There's also sound samples from movies which I never get tired of.

Vocalist Dan Pevide is one intense son of a bitch! I remember seeing some band at the Michigan Death Fest (can't remember their name) and being impressed with the intensity of their vocalist. He just gave it his all on stage and after the band was done he walked off covered in sweat and I swore he was going to collapse. This is the kind of intensity Dan has, if not more. His guttural and deep vocals are unbelievable. I couldn't sing like that for five minutes without fucking up my vocal chords! He has a wide range of styles, but all of them are Death Metal in vein. The higher pitched vocal delivery he has is a bit too much and comes across as gibberish, but the deeper aspect of his vocals are something to behold. The lyrics touch on a myriad of topics and at times are a bit humorous, which is always nice to me. Some song topics are about war / politics, gore, vampirism, and my favorite - one about robbing mausoleums! It's a story about some dude that breaks into mausoleums not to fuck inanimate corpses, but to rob them of their jewelry! The lyrics are well done and tell little stories which is far better than a lot bands these days that write lyrics that don't make sense. I'm not shitting you, I don't know how many times I've read a band's lyrics and not know what they are trying to say. Another thing about the lyrics is that there are A LOT of them. I bet someone could make a small novella out of them if they wished to do so. Dan has so many lyrics to sing within the span of a five minute song, I don't know where he finds time to breathe. He just keeps going and going.

The production is okay for the most part, but the drums are a bit muffled sounding. It would have been nicer if they could have cleaned that up in the mix somehow before calling it good, but the rest of the production is great and really helps create a suffocating atmosphere.

The artwork for the album is done well. While the painting isn't painted with any great detail, it does have some kickass lighting effects that make the shadows really standout. The cover art kind of reminds of of Jack The Ripper showing some dark and shadowy figure, knife in hand, carrying what seems to be a body in a bag. All of the ten thousand lyrics (okay, I'm exaggerating a bit) are included as well as a few live photos of the band members.

ANOXIA has succeeded to impress me where so many others in this genre have failed. While not a perfect album, "Intense Killings" does have some interesting ideas that fans of Death Metal should find as a breath of fresh air. Now all we have to do is wait and see how the band fairs without the great guitar playing and lyrical prowess of Dave Boccuzzi, I have faith in the other members that they can pull off another good album in the future.

Tracklist:
01. Rebirth Of Humanity
02. Visions Of The Unknown
03. Intense Killings
04. Vampiric Whore
05. Victimizing Demise
06. Mausoleum Desecrator
07. Sex Crime Atrocity
08. Bludgeoned By Revenge
09. Fecal Murder
10. Within The Subconscious

Rating: 8.5 / 10
Release Date: 2004
Length: 36:08
Review By: Britton Dicks
Total Reviews: (1)
Bands Website: http://www.freewebs.com/anoxiabrutality/