FLUWID

I don't generally rag on bands for their production choices, but this record sounds like it was recorded behind a wall of wet cotton. The guitars are scooped out and gutless, the low end is weak, and all the vocals sound like they're being sung through a toilet paper tube. The production here is low-rent enough to be distracting, which is a shame — this sounds like a demo, and that's not how you want to make your national debut.

If things did sound huge and crushing, FLUWID might have at least pulled off a minor accomplishment by playing textbook metalcore really, really well. But their flat, sterile sound adorns flat, sterile songs, small-town generic and plain as tap water. This is the most obvious bits of SHADOWS FALL and KILLSWITCH ENGAGE (and the occasional TOOL steal, as on "The Phoenix") boiled down to the most basic verse-chorus-verse mockery and presented without a scrap of irony, much less originality.

Playing spot-the-influence with bands like FLUWID gets boring fast, and wondering how bad the engineer's head cold was on mixdown day only kills a few more minutes. That leaves a lot of time to kill, and not a bit of musical enjoyment to be had, throughout the long, grim slog that is "From Surface to Suffocation". I dunno, maybe they're incredible live, and there's some tragic back story as to why the production here blows goats... but a metal record is supposed to make us rock out, not make excuses for its creators.

Albums like this have no reason to exist — they hurt a band's reputation, kill small labels, and eventually wind up clogging the dollar bins of the world's remaining record stores. It's two thousand fucking ten. You have to be better than this.