Human Infection – Gravesight
“The Most Memorable Parts Are the Bad Parts,
and Everything Else is Just “Meh.”
Written by Big Bear Buchko

Seventeen goddamn tracks.

Are you kidding me?

What the hell is going on with heavy metal these days? It’s either a record that’s full-length at twelve minutes and four tracks long, or it’s the gargle bargle version of the Lord of the friggen Rings. Like, this thing has chapters. Seventeen goddamn tracks.

Y’all… I got shit to do.

And lest ye think that perhaps it’s an example something ala Mindless Self Indulgence, where the album with 30+ song titles listed is still only 45 minutes long - make no mistake, weary traveler; these are seventeen full-length (3 ½ to 5 minutes average) cuts. In other words: we’re not gettin’ through this one quickly at all. My decadent love of a lack of moderation rarely permits me to utter the phrase LESS IS MORE, but guys… come on… dial it back.

Let’s start with the paperwork. The band’s name is Human Infection. Not bad. Bit generic. Bit prime time television. Like, it could be the name of a fake band used on a sitcom to let the viewer know “oh, yeah, that’s a heavy metal band they’re talking about.” Like when Bud & Kelly went to see “Tears and Vomit” on Married… with Children. This is Human Infection. Cut to commercial.

The album is Gravesight, which – again – not bad, bit generic. It’s a non-word, but it paints a picture of what it wants. I get it. The album art is… standard. You could see this thing from a great distance and know exactly what kind of band it was and exactly how it was going to sound.

And that is a lot of what I have to say about Human Infection and Gravesight. The surprises here are non-existent, except for a few minor things that actually work against them, not for. It’s not that I have a lot of complaints or negative things to point out (save for one), it’s very much that this was completely paint-by-numbers. The music’s there but there’s not a lot of groove; the death vocals are fine but there’s no alternating highs or lows, and what lyrics you can (accidentally?) understand are very dialogue-cut-from-Hellraiser, big scary metal band-level of mediocrity. There’s no punch. There’s no impact. It’s… material without substance.

I’m halfway through the 2^nd track – “In Crypts of Holiness” when I decide to dive into the band’s P.R. docket included with the album, and to my chagrin, I find only a Notepad document with multiple sentences formatted as one long, painful line. I have to perpetually scroll as I read, and come to find that – for some reason – they’ve only mentioned one band member in the group, but apparently it’s due to his revolutionary guitar playing that this album is as big and as full as it is. Fascinating as well, as said guitarist (Jeremiah Tuck) is listed everywhere online as their bass player – having nothing done with the primary guitars. Here’s why that matters…

When writing and reviewing, even in my less-positive articles, I try to hold back on unnecessary hyperbole. I try to keep my intensity to a minimum, and strive to keep my words more constructive and less damaging. But here, in this moment, I feel that only harsh, blunt honestly is due. There is something that happens several times throughout this expansive slog of a record; it happens during “Exalted Through Suffering;” it happens during “Artificial Abyss” and “Embrace Perfection;” and in fact, happens so many times that I lose count before the album is through, and it’s the main negative thing I’d mentioned above that we really need to address with Gravesight.

These are, without exaggeration, some of the worst guitar solos I have ever been forced to endure. They don’t go with the rhythm. They don’t go with the other instruments. They are reverbed all to hell and mixed so far to the front, you jump to drop your volume down immediately before your speakers and/or ear drums explode. They are so aggressively unpleasant that, even now, days after having finished the record, it is the only element of Gravesight that I remember. Every half-assed, poorly mixed, poorly played solo comes across like someone asked a beginner blues guitarist to record a part for a song they’ve never heard before and aren’t allowed to listen to while they put it down, and then randomly clicked paste mix, save to whatever part of the song they wanted.

It strikes me like the band really wanted a cool solo in a song, but none of them actually had the chops to pull it off. And that’s it – that’s the only not-generic element of Gravesight: the most memorable parts are the bad parts, and everything else is just “meh.” In the end, the only difference between “Enrapturing the Divine” and “Laserskull Suicide,” or “Wounds Devour You” and “Sovereign to Obscurity” is whether or not it contains one of those goddamn solos. Other than that, I can’t tell any of it apart. Death Metal is a delicate genre, where you have to work hard to make our gargle bargle music sound genre accurate but not musically monotonous. (Believe me, you have no idea how difficult it is as a fan of death metal to tell people how much I hate reggae music because of how much it all sounds the same. Yes, I get the irony, but also, fuck off.) And Human Infection seems to be unable to define that distinction. It’s all just so monotonous, repetitive, generic.   

Yes, yes, rock ‘n roll, hail Satan, heavy metal, cut to commercial.