Centinex – Redeeming Filth

This was a day when we wanted to feel manly, or womanly.  It was a day to break down gender barriers, to enter a world where everyone can be beast and the image is not restricted to false presentations in the media.  This is that day.  This is the day when you toss things around in random rage, tear things apart, smash and obliterate every last piece of glass you can find, and grind it all together with your bare hands.  Your bare hands.  And you take that mess of debris, and you grasp it in those hands, scatter it before you and you smash your forehead into it repeatedly until it bends to your own power and you end up bloodied but yet still beast, foaming at the mouth from the rage of true death metal inside of you.  Thought we weren’t going to get to the point, did you?  Incorrect, and as we smash this keyboard here into pieces, barely typing out these words as the keys fly into the air, caught in our teeth and crunched into dust, let us inform you about Centinex.  Centinex is a straight-up death metal band from Sweden who’ve been around since pretty much the early days.  Since roughly 1990 they’ve released eight full-lengths and tons of demos, EPs, and splits, but reached a point of self-destruction in 2005/2006.  Probably from the above.  Too much beast make man/woman go crazy.  Make man/woman do things make people hurt.  Make man/woman wish more classic death metal like this sound.

  

Few bands in the genre can last this long with so classic a sound, especially today when everything’s constantly changing due to the speed of information and how quickly we process and discard music.  Centinex’s last released was a comeback 7″ EP in 2013 called Teutonische Invasion, and then, finally, in 2014 came back with this one, Redeeming Filth.  Death metal is tough today; to make a comeback after roughly nine years in an era when experimentation and genre-hopping runs high while playing things that were new twenty-something years ago is no small task.  It is only a task for man/woman who want get violent.  That’s the only way, for this to work Centinex needed to reach down in that primal, archaic self all human beings possess, dormant, waiting for the proper motivation to awaken.  Simply put, they needed to play death metal qua death metal, none of that pornogrind crap (how does it even still exist?), nothing too melodic, it needed to be basic, yet brutal, but brutal before the term became so cliche you started to see it on shirts at Urban Outfitters.  Can we find the truth of death metal here?

 

Largely, yes.  Redeeming Filth is of a much higher production quality than you’d expect, and it wastes no time.  It is beast, and it is here, feed it now.  At first go, trust us, the raw meat you toss down its gullet is barely enough to satiate its horrible desires.  Centinex have a command of sickening riffs that instantly hook.  The drums have a sick groove throughout with stomping kicks easily matching the action of your hands as you pound them into the bones of the fallen.  Vocals, also good.: gutturals check, layering check.  But there are three things to note in the complaints department.  Stay your hands, beast, let us explain.  First, the production quality is something of a drag, surprisingly, because it’s almost too clean.  Sometimes that awful sludge of raw recording is to the benefit of death metal, and it feels like something Centinex used in the past to excel, but here it’s gone.  In addition, though solos make their due, there is more of an element of grind than previous work.  Combining this with the high production quality is powerful at first, but then reveals the big issue.  After one listen you’ll say “just awesome”, two listens, “hell yeah we dig it,” three listens “hmm heard this a bit too much already,” fourth listen “time for something else.”  Redeeming Filth is beast, don’t get us wrong, but it requires time to forget before coming back so it feels fresh, because it relies too heavily on the grind, which through the high-production makes it less intoxicating after a few listens, but a great comeback, nonetheless.

 

Centinex Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Centinex – Redeeming Filth
Agonia Records
4 / 5