Hey, look, it’s the new album from Impaled, those loveable Carcass-clones who wear ties and dress shirts in concert! What have they got for us this time, those whacky death-grinders with an excellent sense of humor?

A story driven album. Um… yeah… wait just a second here… what?

Well… yeah. Sure, it IS the stupidest idea ever, but it’s also, of course, tongue-in-cheek, and rather funny, as demonstrated by the many cute sound bites in-between the songs that add to it. Oh, and I really don’t know what the story is about, because it’s fucking irrelevant. It’s there for the laughs, and if you’re a sick shit like me, Theatre of Operations will cause you to laugh until you hurl.

But anyway, on to the music. The production here is… um… well, someone definitely produced this album, but to be honest, there’s no real personality to it. Think of the mix from Morbid Angel’s Heretic without so much fuzzed-up guitar layering. It’s still there, mind you, but not so annoyingly as it was on that album. The drums pack no punch whatsoever, and once again, suffer from a general lack of personality, though they are played rather well. The keyboards (yes, keyboards) are inconsistent: sometimes they’re drowning out the guitars, sometimes it’s impossible to hear them, and sometimes you wish they’d just go the hell away so you can focus on the riffs.

And the riffs are, like any Impaled release, the stars of the show. They’re technical, but not annoyingly so. Catchy, but not contrived. They range from mid-paced to a bit faster, and there’s maybe one slow moment on the album that I may have missed because I wasn’t paying any attention to it, chiefly because Impaled, whenever they attempt a slow section, totally lose me.

Anyway, the one problem with the riffs is that, on this album, far too much is done with a mid-paced tempo. It gets monotonous after a few songs, and then you start zoning out, and wake up around the next sound bite, when you hear something like “Christ! The infection’s spilling out of his ass.”

That’s why Impaled is worth a look at all: because they know how and when to interrupt the seriousness with humor, and they can write some good riffs, as demonstrated on the best song, The Dead Shall Dead Remain, which features some really great vocal dueling that makes use of the… what, three or so vocalists that this band has. The raspy audible voice that reminds me superficially of Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid still leads the pack here, but the growls are even better than they were on the last album, balancing brutality with ability to tell what the hell the fellow is growling.

Anyway, this album is probably the weakest Impaled album as of yet, but they’re all around the seventy-range anyway, so no worries. If you liked the last two albums, buy this one. If you didn’t like the last two albums, don’t bother, but you were going to do that anyway, weren’t you?