Band: Cerebral Bore
Title: Maniacal Miscreation
Label: Earache Records
Distribution: Rough Trade Benelux
Release date: April 11th 2011
Review: CD

One of the most determined bands from the U.K. (Scotland, to be more specific) is this outfit, which includes a female vocalist. Female grunters have never been absent, and several of them perform as convincingly and powerfully as many male colleagues, and in this chick’s case (her name is Simone ‘Som’ Pluijmers, hailing from our own Lowlands): wow!
Also musically I can’t avoid any ‘wow’. No, it has nothing to do with this band being innovative, because they certainly are not. No, neither has it to do with a clean / clinical sound or the addition of modern gadgets. Cerebral Bore perform uncompromising Blast-Death with a grinding brutality à la Dying Fetus, early Suffocation, Gorerotted, Profanation, Internal Suffering or one of Belgium’s finest, Aborted. Nothing more and certainly nothing less, as slamming, torturing and sadistically sickening as those bands. That typical technical Fingerspitzengefühl, the guttural growls including some high-pitched grunts, the hyper-speed rhythms, yes yes yes, all ingredients for a bloody cocktail of Death-Terror; now we need to shake this content carefully (read: mix it with sledgehammer and chainsaw) until the drops of blood create their own taste of venomous bitterness…
The performance quality is above average (hundreds of bands try to sound like Suffocation or Dying Fetus without even coming close to these protagonists’ malignant efforts) – this does not go for Simone only, yet it goes for the three instrumentalists as well. Yet unfortunately there’s less variety in between the tracks than, let’s say, Aborted or Dying Fetus, and it makes the whole almost sound ‘too much’ after a while. Another possibly negative element is the limited duration again: just half an hour. Yes, a contradiction (annoying after a while versus too short total running time), yet so what?

78/100

Ivan Tibos.