Hard to get a grip on this noisy, chaotic affair from Nefastus Dies, the Canadian band featuring former Ion Dissonance vocalist Ill-Fate. Musically speaking, there's a lot going on here, Urban Cancer proving to be one hell of an extreme platter with surprising amounts of melody squeezed into the brutality. Jackhammer blast beats and rapidly picked tremolo riffing almost take this into black metal territory, but the uncompromising vocals of Ill-Fate quickly squash that idea to shreds, his hideous, demonic wails & grunts taking Urban Cancer down some demented death-grind avenue where there is no hope for return from. Musically, there's a lot to dig into here, the riffs having an almost Dark Funeral-ish quality, the drums unrelenting, and tracks like "The irony of Anti-Establishment Ideologies" and "Primal Chaos Layers" showing that extreme metal can be melodic. Though Ill-Fate has plenty of sides to his maniacal rantings, at times it's just way too much, and he tends to overshadow the rest of the band, especially on grand, epic pieces such as "None of the Above" and the 13-minute "Cost Effective Mergers" (nice use of symphonic keyboards and layered guitar textures on the latter.) All in all, a pretty frightening slab of blackened death metal, and if you can take the over-the-top vocal histrionics, you'll find lots to sink your teeth into here.
Track Listing
1) Fragments of Poisoned Components
2) Primal Chaos Layers
3) Hate Vector
4) The irony of Anti-Establishment Ideologies
5) None of the Above
6) Spawns of Illegitemacy
7) Cost Effective Mergers