Aborted – Global Flatline

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Poor Aborted. The Belgian death-grind outfit has been flirting with crossing the line from obscure death-grind band to popular tour-opening band for so long that it’s just become tiring. The band’s seventh album, Global Flatline is pretty much just more of the same: modern death metal formula with a few great moments and a few terrible moments. Rather then evoking the same catchy deathgrind stylings of bands like Skinless or early Dying Fetus as they’ve done in the past, Aborted settles for a quite uninspired modern death metal approach to this album. For every horror-movie sample and catchy melodic solo, there are an equal amount of downtuned breakdowns that are way too overused. The band seems like they’re content with sounding more akin to Whitechapel than Carcass nowadays. On The Origin Of Disease, the band creates a perfect opportunity to have brutal, straight-forward riffs but instead opt for downtuned breakdowns. Fecal Forgery is a highpoint on the album, though. Mostly because it’s so short and fast that it doesn’t really leave any time for any of the disappointing elements of the other songs to be thrown in as an afterthought. It’s the things like the small glimpses of old-school deathgrind, the solo’s (really the best part of this album), and the great use of sampling that are keeping Aborted from fading into obscurity, but Global Flatline is, at best, Cryptopsy‘s The Unspoken King without most of the embarrassment.

Written by Jackson May
More: 2012, Albums, Death Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Aborted