Metal Underground.com

I've been a fan of Simone Pluijmers since her YouTube days. While most female extreme metal vocalists still sound somewhat feminine (Angela Gossow, Tristessa, Katherine Katz, etc.), Simone is able to successfully sound like a dude. So Cerebral Bore deserves credit for that feat alone - not that I don’t enjoy female vocalists - and for the fact that whiners will finally shut up when they say that women can't be in death metal bands.

Inevitable talk about Ms. Pluijmers aside, Cerebral Bore's debut album, "Maniacal Miscreation," is a seriously heavy piece of brutal death metal that borrows more from Suffocation than Waking the Cadaver, and transcends its initial gimmick in favor of shoving an explosive heat-seeking needle into your brain. More importantly, this album actually has hooks, which I wish I could say applied to more brutal death metal albums.

Moreover, Paul McGuire has some serious chops. It's great to hear a guitarist who excels at both playing and writing music, and that's certainly the case here. Once this band gets a bit more established, I'm expecting to hear McGuire get name dropped, since he's a fantastic guitarist for a man his age. There could be more solos, but there isn't any incentive for the band to have them, as they only have one guitarist and I'd rather have a good live show over guitar solos any day.

Yet, I still don't expect too many purists to like this. While mild, there's still a -core influence in the form of pig squeals and occasional breakdowns in an attempt to be relevant and attract a contemporary crowd. Not that this is a bad thing, since Cerebral Bore are still vastly better than 98% of deathcore (or brutal death metal) bands out there. Point being, despite being modern, it's still a damn good piece of metal.

My only complaint is that many of the lyrics are from a male perspective and hearing a woman growl out lyrics about her dick isn't as funny as it is awkward. Hopefully, Simone will be writing her own lyrics for the next album from a female perspective, or else she'll begin to get the same sort of rumors spread about her that Lady Gaga had going a few years back (not that there's such a thing as bad publicity though).

Despite my own jaded states and dislike of many new artists, Cerebral Bore are an exception, who manage to buck the trend of really horrible brutal death metal and deathcore artists that over-saturate the metal scene today. This is a great debut and Cerebral Bore has nowhere to go from here but up.