Gravebirth - Decrepit

I bought this CD in 2021 at the Millvale Music Festival in Pennsylvania. I lived in Pittsburgh at the time so I took the bus over to Millvale to see some friends perform (shout out to Melt, Tough Cuffs, Catatoneya, and God’s Green Apples!) and figured I’d walk around. Gravebirth played after r.i.c.k., an ignorant grindcore (?) band made of some local teenagers. I remember a trash can getting elbow-dropped by an audience member. I was not yet as sour on deathcore then as I am now. Their rhythms were tight, and their vocalist had stage presence. I bought their demo EP at the merch table and didn’t think much of it.

It’s a real shame that the energy of their live performance didn’t make it onto the disc. Hell, I would have settled for the rhythms to be correct. This EP has one of the worst cases of midi-drum-itis I’ve ever encountered. They quantized and processed the drums to hell, but they couldn’t figure out how to do the same for the guitars. The kick drums have been uniformly programmed to click on every beat the riff was supposed to land in every breakdown, and the guitars simply aren’t there. The guitars are hilariously far ahead, stumbling over rhythms 20 BPM faster than everything else. Then there are these stupid little subsonic kicks to transition between the sections that all sound the same. When they’re not causing hemorrhages in my eardrums, all they serve to do is make the rest of the songs sound like they’re missing the low frequencies in comparison.

The vocalist has two screams, a low and goofy but powerful one, and an annoyingly screechy one. They’re mixed for articulation and not for vibes. I hate how forward and piercing they are, not even unpleasant in a cool way. I suppose that if you focus on the shitty vocals, you’re not focusing on the guitars charging forward ahead of the robotic drums.

I don’t particularly want to understand deathcore lyrics, and these are bad even for deathcore. I’ll just leave it at that.

The CD packaging is honestly kind of hilarious. The logo is all right, I guess, but it’s a bit too legible. The faux-edgy typewriter font for the credits is god-awful. The interior booklet is very jpeggy, which makes me think they designed it at too small a resolution and just zoomed in. There’s a lot of asset reuse. The cover art is the rear cover art is the interior booklet art is the CD art is the art behind the CD. The disc itself at least has the decency to decrease the contrast and chroma to make it look different.

As I said before, I’m not a deathcore guy. I might never have liked any of their work even if it was produced better and recorded on-tempo. But if I were a deathcore guy, I would still feel the way I do, because this is bad deathcore anyway.

Decrepit by Gravebirth is a bad EP and I don’t like it.