Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

When the most interesting thing about an album is the horny naked chick on the cover, it just might be time to move onto the next CD in the rotation. Italian band, The Secret, suffers just that fate on their new disc, Disintoxication, which attempts brutal grindcore, but end up making just so much noise that any message hidden in Marco Coslovich’s thoroughly unintelligible vocals gets lost in the muck. That just might be the sense they’re going for, as the press surrounding the disc makes prominent mention of the suicide attempts, jail time, and other assorted maladies/tragedies befalling the band since their 2004 debut. If hopelessness is the theme, well, maybe they’ve succeeded after all, as this disc just grinds through bleaker and more depressing territories through its 9 tracks.

The sad thing is, even at its sleek run time of just over a half hour, judging from the saggy rear end of this disc, it sounds like the band was already running out of things to scream about. The best tracks on Disintoxication all come in the first half of the album. The title track, the first full length song on the disc, might just be the best of the lot, but it might be because at that point the listener hasn’t yet been subject to the rest of the album. Despite that, the spastic fury on display immediately catches your ear, even as you try to figure out what exactly is going on. The abrupt ending featured here, and on other tracks, doesn’t much help, as it leaves one with a WTF feeling to pile onto all the other WTFs elicited by The Secret. The madness continues on Inferno, which comes across as a syncopated death march.  The very next track, Poisoned Blood is Never Enough, raises the bar  even more, scaling probably the heaviest and most consistent heights offered on the disc, but it’s too short to make enough of a good, or lasting impression.

The biggest problem is the sense that The Secret suffers from attention deficit disorder, unable to stick with a theme for the life of them. There’s something to be said for being able to switch from basic grindcore to doomy rhythms at the drop of a hat. The trick is to do so while retaining some semblance of song structure, and this band hasn’t quite got that knack. At best, you could say they might approximate a pale imitation of what the likes of Meshuggah have to offer. At worst, you have the mess turned in on Disintoxication.