CoC : Tourettes Syndrome - Sicksense : Review

Tourettes Syndrome - _Sicksense_
(Armageddon Music, 2006)
by: Pedro Azevedo (2 out of 10)

Hailing from Australia, and featuring a very prominent frontwoman in Michele Madden, Tourettes Syndrome have chosen a pretty appropriate name for their band. Tourette's syndrome, the neurological disorder, consists of "multiple facial and other body tics", but is also "often accompanied by grunts and compulsive utterances, as of interjections and obscenities". This seems quite appropriate given the spasmodic nature of the music itself, both instrumentally and as far as Madden's vocal delivery goes: she can grunt in addition to her varied clean singing. She can't grunt very well at all, but grunt she does once in a while.

The band's sound is as much mainstream metal as it is sleazy rock 'n' roll and a few other things, all jumbled together into a less than entirely coherent mix. Patience begins to wear thin far too early on in the album, as most of the songs just don't have much to offer and come across as either blatantly commercial or trying too hard to sound heavy. This results in the album falling apart for anyone that is even halfway familiar with good extreme metal, with the supposedly heavy parts seeming more of a mockery of extreme metal, and the commercial ones just annoying rather than entertaining the listener.

Contact: http://www.armageddonmusic.de

(article published 23/10/2006)