Malignancy

a) “Neglected Rejection”
b) “Benign Reabsorption”
c) “Predicated Malformations”
d) “Embryological Teratomas”

Okay, here’s how it works - you guess which ones are actual titles of songs by the band Malignancy, and which songs were created by me, inebriated after a night of Jäger-bombs using a thesaurus opened randomly to two different pages.

Give up? All the titles are songs by the band Malignancy. Most likely created with a thesaurus opened randomly to two different pages after a night of Jäger-bombs. This could very easily make the band seem dumb. Like, remember when Slayer would try to use big words in their songs to make them sound smart? Come on now - don’t tell me you didn’t scour the dictionary for abacinate the first time you heard “Angel of Death.” Great band, great music, but let’s face it - not the sharpest cleavers in the block.

Are Malignancy dumb? I didn’t grade their SAT’s, so who the hell knows? Besides, you don’t need a MENSA membership to make a good album - and Inhuman Grotesqueries is a pretty darn good album in the death/grind vein. Good, meaty slabs of guitar with almost every three bars punctuated with a good-ol’ fashioned power chord. I’ll be honest - I’m a bit more fond of the band’s earlier works - a bit more on the grind tip and they scared the shit out of me upon first hearing their latest release, Inhuman Grotesqueries with the generic acoustic intro to the first and title track, but at the eight-second mark, the album kicks in with all the growls, cymbal-bell stop-start time signatures and all is right with the world.

For fans of the band, there’s not a whole lot new going on - the same beefy chugga-chugga-clang with the “clang” provided by new-ish drummer Mike Heller - a very capable drummer providing solid backup for what must be the stamina equivalent of a marathon run at full sprint. As always, vocalist Danny Nelson is more than ready to scare the shit out of the neighbors with his hellish growls and screams. Though you might not think it, “Pollutant is breathed through unclean oxygen / Viral strain begins its decadence” is hard to pull off and sound like you mean it - to scream them as if they’re words worth hearing. Or at the very least, to say them without making people laugh.

Malignancy has shown through their fourteen some-odd years that they are a good band. Not necessarily memorable, but a good band nonetheless. A band that has shown some growth and maturity (no, really) in their songwriting and musicianship throughout the years, but can still maintain a winking eye at the old-school absurdity of the genre.

6.9 / 10 — Kevin Fitzpatrick