Band:	Catch 22
Album:	Monumetal
Style:	Thrash metal
Release date:	March 2011

01. Power Revolution Mad
02. Contained?
03. ...And the Fire Still Burns
04. Killing Time
05. Igniter
06. Exciter's Lust
07. Downward Spiral
08. Switchblade Hate
09. Against The Grain
10. Twisted, Ruined And Black
11. Catch 22

I'm starting to realize what a black hole of excitement is. This is it. My soul has finally found something boring enough to crawl into and die. There's no expressing how ironic a title like Monumetal is.

Words to describe this album? It's a heavy metal album. An extremely amateur sounding heavy metal album. The first thing that jumps out it is how horrible the recording on this is, it's demo quality, and by demo quality, I mean high-school-garage-band-on-a-4-track demo quality. It's almost impossible to believe this band has already put out several albums. Don't get me wrong, stripped-down can be an incredible direction to go, the first few Danzig albums are a testament to that, Catch 22 on the other hand are a testament to the fact that you shouldn't attempt "stripped-down" unless you can pull it off. Monumetal just sounds incredibly awkward and imbalanced when it isn't overwhelmingly bland. Just picture a compilation of the most basic Iced Earth segments being played by a bunch of drunks, recorded through a $20 4-track tape deck.

If your fingers aren't racing to the "stop" button out of annoyance over the inconsistencies of the instrument tracking, then the wretched boredom will definitely claw at you. The riffs and lyrics are so unbelievably generic, the band almost comes off as some kind of heavy-metal parody. In fact, when listening to this, it's hard not to believe that these guys are some type of virtuosos with an edge of comedic genius and a hatred of heavy metal fans, so they concoct something so unbelievably flavourless as a kind of science experiment to see how many people will actually buy into it.

If you can manage to hold your attention onto to something like this for longer than perhaps 5 minutes, chances are drowsiness will set in, followed by that starchy feeling you get in your mouth after a long nap.