I’ve got some thoughts on brain death, but before we get into that, let’s bring up the new EP from Nepente, entitled I Will Get Your Soul. The band combines elements of death metal, grindcore and some hardcore, and while the EP’s only got four songs—and a mere 22-minute run time—it’ll still most likely ruin your sanity and leave you drooling on your keyboard. In essence, the title’s pretty accurate; this thing has the potential to actually steal your soul.
So, I have this theory about souls. Religions—the vast majority, at least—think that the soul lives on long after our body. The belief is that our soul, as an immortal ethereal being, removes itself from our deceased body and travels into a myriad of netherworlds (depending on the religion) by many different methods of travel (again, depending on the religion). But what if our soul never actually leaves our body? What if our soul is the same thing that has been driving us from the moment we emerge from the womb?
Recent empirical scientific research shows that the brain actually lives on long after the body ceases to be. So, the conclusion to my theory has been that the brain, currently residing inside our banged up cranial cavity, is actually our soul. Thus, it is our brains that religion has been speaking about for all these years. After all, aren’t our brains the central core of who we are? Isn’t it our brains that make us inherently good or inherently evil? Regardless, science now holds that our brains will live on after our bodies die. It will continue to think and dream (proven by research of postmortem brain activity) while our body slowly decays until, in the end, we reach complete death, or “brain death.” And with that, onto the EP!
I Will Get Your Soul opens innocently enough with its title track, serving up some melodramatic acoustic work before flying off the handle and down the chute of death metal into grindcore-land. The vocals vascilate between a low, barking death metal growl and a tortured tenor scream, depending on the instrumental backdrop. The second track, “Show Me That You are Suffering” opens with a similar gimmick to the title track—an ominous, single guitar sorrowfully bellowing out an intro—but then takes the opposite approach of immediately descending into grindcore before coming back to reality in an effort to set a death metal groove.
Overall, the album is just…unmoving. The tracks fail to differentiate themselves from each other, as the formula tends to be a bit A-B, B-A. The third track, “Gray Lands” is so similar to the second that you might have a rough time distinguishing them in a blindfolded test. They’re even separated in length by a mere six seconds. The album closes with “Last Rites,” in which the same, tired formula is once again employed. The vocals actually end up sounding almost screamo as the simplicity of the subject matter becomes painfully clear.
Although the album does, as promised, melt your face off, it’s mostly out of sheer boredom in the firing line of loud noise. Nepente does not lack for talent and they do not lack for production, but they certainly do lack for ideas—specifically, original ones. You get the feeling they could learn well from fellow South American bands infusing thrash and new wave influences into their metal. The tracks on I Will Get Your Soul, even at their roughly-five-minute-apiece length, feel tiresome. Nepente have not yet crossed the mountain and descended into the valley of sound that will bring them success. I hope, for their sake, they may one day make the journey—but this recording is not promising.
-Manny-O-War
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