INSIDEAD, Chaos Elecdead  (2011, Massacre)

The skull:
The very definition of “passionless art.” A skull. With fangs. Steely gray. Symmetrical. Flanked by wings, bones and bird skulls. (The Council have ruled that this does not violate the “no skulls” rule, as only human skulls are under consideration for Big Dumb Skulls.) Zero style, zero meaning. It looks a lot like 45 other covers of albums also released on Massacre Records in the last 5 years.

The music:
If there’s one thing I hate more than crappy skull covers like this one, it’s the “name game” so many bands play. For instance, Skinlab album title reVoltingRoom, or The Gathering’s if_then_else. Insidead do this too and prefer that their name be written thusly: InsIDeaD. Apparently this is some sort of cleverness having to do with the id part of the brain. And if there’s something I hate more than the name game, it’s silly metal portmanteaus, such as “Elecdead” in this album title (ie. “elected”) or that already-forgotten Swedish band Construcdead (“constructed”) and their genius album title Violadead (“violated”). There are others, but these are some of the ones that use the word “dead.” And if there’s one thing I hate more than these silly metal portmanteaus it’s crappy modern metal that sounds like a mixture of latter-day Sepultura and any day Pantera with tons of breakdowns and the obligatory “motherfucker!” yelp. The band describes their music as “a mixture of heavy, thrash and death core elements with a modern touch.” No wonder. Just wait till you hear the ballad “Time,” which sounds like Nickelback covering Metallica’s “The Unforgiven” with a heavy Greek accent. The latter they cannot help, but everything else is a voluntary exercise in generic modern metal, and Chaos Elecdead (it hurts just to type it) is possibly the most uninteresting and pointless album I’ve had to listen to during these skull excavations thus far.
— Friar Wagner