Grind-break-post-nu-metal-industrial-mathcore-deathelectro aka Infection Code. Think Meshuggah meets Ministry meets Korn meets Into The Moat walking by Faith No More. Italians, Infection Code are and they have been around since 1999. Sterile is their third musical outing, and well, it is a pretty hard one to judge for it contains 17 styles, 16 songs, (almost) no apparent choruses, unclear structuring and shrill production.

This album reminds me a lot of Dimension Seven’s Infinite Madness-album, which completely killed the band and its future. Most of those parrallels lie in the awful production. The drums simply sound terrible: high shrieking noises all the time, with an all too apparent snare drum, in two words: ‘oh dear’. All treble and no bass, very unbalanced. The production I think is the number one reason the music doesn’t hit as hard as it should. It leaves no lasting impression, because everything sounds so light, while this kind of music should sound and feel like an earthquake.
There are other reasons of course, why this album doesn’t sound and feel like an earthquake: the vocals. It is partly due to the production of course that Gabriele’s screams sound like a choking cat, but there’s obviously also a problem with the man’s throat in that he can bring very little valuable variation to his singing. ‘Valuable variation’, because he does bring variety, but most of it doesn’t really add anything to the music. His screams grow tiresome after three songs, which leaves you with Jonathan Davis-like trembling clean singing, and his ‘talking voice’. The ‘talking voice’ was a feature well used by the mathcore band Glass Casket last year, but here it really falls flat right after its initiation and is an utterly useless attempt to add some well needed depth. The Korn-esque trembling vocals are lost upon the listener as well, because well, it makes you think of nu-metal of days long gone and of the eventual futility of a complete musical genre that died five years after conception.

A small mention should also go out to the guitarplay as well, for it is not imaginative enough to carry the album and it holds some ‘Out – X-position’- like nu-metal type riffs. The only thing that tries to carry this album is the music’s structuring, which is quite odd (the structuring). There are touches of brilliance here and there (‘Narcotica’, ‘Seventh Scar’), but the biggest problem with the structuring is that, although innovative, it also stops the songs from ever really ‘happening’. Often while you listen to a song, you’ll hear a very promising part and hope the band will further the song with that particular part as a basis, but they never do. Another part is then implemented that quickly draws the attention away from the shred of ingenuity just heard and leaves you with a half-assed song that sounds unfinished and too unpolished. Thus, time and time again, the band kills itself. With ‘Candledrome’, the album closer, it is no different until the end of the song, which is merely a piano loop with a woman singing over it: really beautiful, very refreshing and a fitting way to end the album.

All in all, Infection Code’s ‘Sterile’, indeed sounds ‘Sterile’ thanks to the production and unfinished thanks to everything else. There’s some nice programming here and there but it’s not enough to carry the album. It’s admirable to have a band that doesn’t impose any boundaries on themselves and also great that guitarist Davide, as stated in the band’s bio, is ‘terribly proud’ of the achievement that constitutes ‘Sterile’, but one must wonder that if they are so proud of this, does that mean they played to their fullest potential? The next record has to be three times as good as this to mean anything and really start something, and if they are indeed on top of their game right now, the future of Infection Code looks grim, dreary and very short.
It is only because of the end of ‘Candledrome’ that this album gets half a point more than it would have otherwise.