Review: MILKING THE GOATMACHINE “Milking In Blasphemy”

MILKING THE GOATMACHINE “Milking In Blasphemy”
NoiseArt Records

As I wrote once there’s really huge scene with many bands playing all sub-genres of Metal which we only can imagine in Berlin. One of representatives of this more brutal and uncompromised kinds of our beloved music is MILKING THE GOATMACHINE. Band was born in 2008 and “Milking in Blasphemy” is their seventh full-length. Actually they released only albums in their career. Only two guys play there – as I suppose brothers Udder. There played with them one guy, but it seems that it was only an episode without big meaning for the band. Of course on gigs brothers are supported by two more musicians.

However, we have here sixteen songs of, how these guys call it, Death Metal/Grindcore. Well, I haven’t the least desire to fight over proportions of both genres in music of our German friends. In my opinion description of musicians is right and it’s more Death than Grind, but to be honest I don’t care if somebody will agree with me or not. Songs are rather short (the longest one, “Straw Bale Apocalypse”, takes 3.39) and in middle tempo, mostly. Riffs aren’t super developed, they’re also not so very broken ones (even if they’re definitely Death Metal ones and I absolutely don’t mean Melodic Death Metal here!). To tell you truth they’re in its brutal way melodic. We can also notice some “crying” guitar here, too. It happens few times on album, but you’d have to be deaf to don’t hear this. Of course there’re long fragments when Goatfreed plays just brutal and fast as well! By the way, he’s also responsible for bass parts. Second brother Goatleeb is responsible here for drumming and vocalizes. This first is as well as guitar’s play rather in middle tempo. There’re speed-ups, but generally it’s “calm” and quite various – of course as much as, let’s call them, standards of the genre let it be. I hear that Goatleeb uses cymbals often what is always plus for me. It doesn’t take place all the time, but enough often to make music complete. What about vocal, it’s just a quite deep growling, but not in the vein of Slamming Death Metal and stuff like that. I’d rather call it by old-school Death/Grind growling.

To sum up we get here good piece of brutality. But it’s not brutality like “let’s play as fast as possible!” it’s more brutality with mind. I mean, it’s really easy to notice that guys think during creating their songs, give some technique to them and so on. I’m happy that I can listen to this album from time to rime. And it motivates me to get their other albums.