Mortification - "Brain Cleaner"

Mortification - Brain Cleaner

2004, Rowe Productions

1. Boaconstrictor

2. Too Much Pain

3. Purest Intent

4. Free As a Bird

5. Brain Cleaner

6. I'm Not Your Commodity

7. The Flu Virus

8. Livin' Like a Zombie

9. 12 Men

10. Louder Than the Devil

11. E.D.

"Brain cleaner! Yeah, brain cleaner!" I heard the title song's chorus on Itunes and I smiled. It's silly, but still kind of cool. Though I confess after having heard this album in its entirity sometimes I don't know whether Steve Rowe wants me to take Mortification seriously or not. On the one hand you have the return of blast beats, furious riffs, and the deep growls of the old albums. On the other hand you have some more of the simplistic song structure and downright silly lyrics of the newer discs. Steve's got a couple songs like "Purest Intent" and "I'm Not Your Commodity" in which he defends his art but it's hard to take him seriously when he writes lyrics which are, and I am not making these up, "I like the grind and I like death metal/I like the thrash crossover that's simple/I like the power metal extremes/I like the doom and shouting out Jesus!" Good heavens... lyrics like these are just lazy in my opinion. If you want to make art... then MAKE ART, don't just yell at me about how you don't care what I think! Then there's "The Flu Virus" - I have no idea what this song is about. Is the flu shot like salvation? Is he saying everyone gets the flu? I don't know. On the plus side, I do like "Livin' Like a Zombie" and its autobiographical lyrics about how busy he is and I think that the title song, "Brain Cleaner" strikes the perfect balance between decent message, toungue-in-cheek humor, and metal. I wish the whole album was like that song. So yeah... despite the return to their thrashier roots, I'm still not a later-era Morty believer just yet. This is way better than Hammer of God though.

I would also like to point out that in the liner notes "Boaconstricter" and "I'm Not Your Commodity" are misspelled.

Useless Fact: The cover art is, I suspect, a parody of Harry Potter. The little boy on the cover is Steve's son, I think.