Humanity's Last Breath – Structures Collapse

“Structures Collapse” is the second EP from Swedish death metal band Humanity’s Last Breath. Apparently their first EP was deathcore in style, but lately they have moved on to a death metal/djent style. I’ve been hearing about djent and Meshuggah a lot more than usual lately. A fair number of bands that list them as an influence, which is interesting to me as I’ve never really been a big Meshuggah fan, but I tend to like the bands they influence.

“Structures Collapse” has five songs but it clocks in at a respectable 25 minutes, so it has some meat on its bones. My first impression was that this was going to be a pretty straight-forward brutal slab of metal, but on closer inspection it has a little more nuance than that. The music tends to be fast and heavy and even brutal, but it also exhibits a complexity that transcends simple brutality. The songs also come in different speeds than just fast and stopped; there are even some slow clean parts, for example about halfway through track two, “Deceivement” and the beginning of the last track, “The Aftermath.”

The vocals sound pretty good; they are very harsh and definitely contribute to the brutality of the music. I like them, my only minor critique would be to maybe vary the pitch a little bit so the voice is not quite so monotone sounding. I mean, it’s rather impressive being able to sing harsh and keep a steady note like that, but mixing it up more would only make the songs more interesting. Other than that the vocals are nicely seated in the mix. The production is pretty middle of the road. The mix doesn’t have a lot of punchy compression to it, but the recordings themselves are quality and do a good job of representing the style of music they play.

I like the band name too; it’s a little more creative than some of the multi-word death metal band names we’ve been seeing in recent years. Any day now I expect to hear of a band called Mashed Into A Pulp or Bloody Chunks Of You (I just Googled to make sure those weren’t actually band names, and it didn’t look like they were so I think I’m safe.) I realize there are many, many bands and today people are forced to go multi-word to find something that hasn’t been used, but some of these names are just goofy. Anyway, I like Humanity’s Last Breath, check ‘em out.