I have made some questionable decisions in my lifetime, such as sticking a fork into a live electrical socket, investing in Bernard Madoff, and (briefly) voting Republican. But never have I made a decision I so viscerally regretted as much as I did when I decided to listen to the album Multidimensional, the debut from metal (?) band Lifeforms.
Lifeforms are probably the most misguided band I've had the unfortunate experience to hear. To give you as charitable a summary as I can, they sound as if the band decided to take the vocals from Demilich and throw them on top of Periphery demos rejected for being too generic. Unfortunately, the band has neither the gracious fortune of being Demilich nor a djent band even slightly better than the formulaic swill that is Periphery. The result is an album so aurally aggravating, so compositionally egregious, that it represents an uncultured affront to the very foundations of music itself. I am honestly at a loss to pick out anything that is of musical interest or merit in this release; everything Lifeforms do from a djent perspective has been done to death (and significantly better) by scores of bands before them, their compositional style is insultingly derivative and uninspired, and their vocalist sounds like he is actively trying to dislodge something from the back of his throat.
You have to imagine the conversation that led to this album being recorded. Somewhere, at some point along the line, some person had to both conceive, recognize as a good idea, and then somehow communicate to other thinking agents the notion of belching loudly into a microphone alongside a five year old's understanding of math metal. And then those people, who themselves are capable of self-reflection, had to actually agree. It boggles the mind. If there is any persuasive argument against the supposed intelligence of humankind, this album would be it. Inflicting this album upon others should be considered a form of assault; listening to it voluntarily should be listed in the DSM as a potential symptom of several mental disorders.
I'm not even going to recommend this band if you happen to like certain selective, nuanced brands of music. In all honestly, having a taste discerning enough to know that you are capable of liking some things and disliking others implies a level of intellectual sophistication that immediately disqualifies you from possibly deriving any kind of satisfaction from this album. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
