(We present DGR‘s review of the debut album from the Belgian death-dealers Coffin Feeder.)
We’ve joked about it over the years but there does exist something in the vocalist world that we’ve referred to as the “Sven effect”, wherein any band that has a feature from vocalist Sven de Caluwé is going to inevitably sound like one of his projects. Him being one of the more consistent and prolific guest vocalists out there certainly doesn’t help matters either; the guy is just so recognizable that he could almost never commit a crime because someone would be able to pick him out of a lineup while in another country.
The recipe is simple too: if you take Sven and put him over some sort of grinding death metal or deathcore riff, inevitably it is going to sound like it has emerged from his wide-reaching works within the infrastructure of his biggest project, Aborted.
You have to work very, very hard in order to avoid this, though a handful of bands have managed to do so over the years. Most recently and impressively, the progressive death metal group Eternal Storm featured him on their song “A Dim Illusion” and it actually played out more like the band bent him to their will rather than the other way around.
But does this same effect exist when it comes to Sven‘s own projects and the works he has brought into his orbit over the years? Is one person’s taste for rapid-fire blast and grinding guitar enough that all of them become one amorphous mass or is there enough on offer that part of the interest will come from hearing how a particular sculpture might’ve been crafted in spite of one guy’s spotlight being so suffocatingly bright that even when it’s not his choice, any similarities to his career are going to fall into his lap?
It has to be vexing at times, but by that same token perhaps it is worth it to just throw caution to the wind.
Coffin Feeder hail from Belgium and are a self-admitted deathcore-aiming death-metal-sounding project with a taste for the machismo heavy pop culture of the ’80s and early ’90s – any of this sounding familiar yet?
Launched in a reverie of particularly inspired insanity in 2021 the band have subsisted so far on two EPs – one punching in at six songs entitled Stereo Homicide and the other at four and bearing the name Over The Top – before launching their official first full-length via Listenable Records in late April 2025 under the title Big Trouble. While it has been a healthy few months since the release of Big Trouble the album has had plenty of time to sink in, and in that time has remained a tremendous intellectual curiosity – in large part because, due to their admirable dogged determination to say “fuck it” and throw caution to the wind in regards to ballet dancing through the minefields of similarity, Coffin Feeder have created an album that sounds like a vocalist’s career folding in on top of itself.
For an album as straightforward and easily understood as Big Trouble the questions remain strangely many. Some of them are related more toward what font of inspiration the band may have drawn from, while others veer into just how worried they might’ve been that they were dancing into another group’s territory, and what artistically fulfilling purpose an album like Big Trouble might find itself serving for both artist and listeners (though “we wanted to have fun” is an equally valid argument), and finally, just how much “deathcore” is actually present within the band’s sound, because one fat breakdown does not a deathcore-leaning band make, or is it merely derived from the songwriting being a little more punchy and less path-wandering than other projects have been recently?
The crazy part to all this meandering philosophizing as it relates to Big Trouble? Even a multitude of listens in, we’re still not a thousand percent sure that there’s a satisfying answer to any of it. Though there isn’t a nearly as infectious – and subtly dark – ’80s pop song about it, there is a decent amount of weight to the idea of a group creating stuff for the sheer virtue of having fun and the surface-level nodding and acknowledgement of such as “sick”. In a way, it feels almost like the album was designed to make a brain short-circuit, because Coffin Feeder‘s Big Trouble is one of those releases where one could tap a ruler on a chalkboard next to the phrase exactly what it says on the tin and write it up as a good public service.
As mentioned above, Big Trouble is constructed of odes to the pop culture juggernauts of the ’80s and very early ’90s – those that held on as one decade slowly died away and gave birth to what will likely be the next retro-nostalgia deathcore throwback era – but like many of these projects, most of that inspiration lies solely in song title and lyrical tilt. Musically, Coffin Feeder find themselves in line with a dominant form of high-speed deathcore, slightly less grind, but still blurring the line enough with Aborted that you sometimes see less of the line blurring between the two and more melting.
Granted, it’s not like either of these bands aren’t known for sharing similar sonic playgrounds – especially when the larger of the two adds musicians to its lineup often enough that its sound gradually morphs to match the newest individual – but when you see the same circle of friends being asked to come back for round two or three within two albums it starts to feel more like a cottage industry built around blastbeats and bruiser riffwork.
It’s exciting to hear Benighted’s Julien Truchen pop up again for more vocal shenanigans during opener “Porkchop Express” but Coffin Feeder do themselves an injustice by breaking out the guest crewmates so early in Big Trouble. Both “Porkchop Express” and “If It Bleeds” have people tagging in to help out on the growls front. While the songs themselves are both killer, snappy affairs, it does feel a little like obligation before Coffin Feeder are truly allowed to stand on their own. This is also where the debate begins of just how much “deathcore” the Coffin Feeder team actually are, because the Belgian allies here can’t quite help themselves enough to slow down fully and just go for the dumbest breakdowns possible. Across Big Trouble as a whole, they’re more start/stop affairs built out of chugging riffs that sometimes wouldn’t even be that out of place if they had just been used out of main-verse segments.
Thus, Coffin Feeder are at an odd crossroads of playing out like a coffee-blend of its members’ constituent projects but building it into one mountain of its own, designed mostly for folks whose main interaction with music is utterance of the word “Sick”. Which to be fair, is true. There’s a lot of moments worth pointing at across Big Trouble and just uttering “….sick” , as it is a pop-culture-reference-filled album whose surface-level skimming of pop culture has the band existing as pop-art of their own.
Mark Hunter of Chimaira fame gets to be part of one of Big Trouble’s highlight songs, “Plain Zero”. Sitting in the middle of the album, “Plain Zero” picks and chooses from a lot of deathgrind and deathcore staple guitar parts to build itself, so while it isn’t wholly original – one imagines standing on the shoulders of giants enough to actually crush them into the ground such that they then exist as just a head buried in the dirt – it is constructed as a moshpit anthem, and that is harder than hell to deny. “Plain Zero” hammers into existence and you’ve started headbanging before you notice it. At the least, it’s a dangerous song to drive to because you’re liable to get pulled over based on subconciously putting your foot to the floor just as hard as the band are doing here.
“Plain Zero” is also amplified by an unsung follower in “OBEY”, which is equally brutal on all fronts. It’s the mid-section of Big Trouble where the album does stand out more, if not just because the band drift away from the endless Arnold references enough that the man himself can go back to raising his mini-horses in Southern California and be left alone for a song or two. Not that he gets to rest for long since Coffin Feeder go on another two-song tear afterward before hitting an ominous moment and adventurous pairing in their last few songs.
Perhaps it is because so many of the songs on Big Trouble are rigidly straightforward on the aggression front that it seems like a paring of “H.I.S.S” that bleeds over into “A Good Day To Die” feels adventurous for team Coffin Feeder. Effectively a build up to a quote from G.I JOE, “H.I.S.S” oscillates between full-on atmospherics and near-incomplete song. Part of the experience is finding yourself wanting more from the massive build up that the minute-and-forty-three-seconds of that song offers and the other part is wondering if the Coffin Feeder guys could’ve expanded upon it in any way that is interesting. The beneficiary then is not so much “H.I.S.S” itself but its follower “A Good Day To Die”, which is an apocalyptic three minutes and forty seconds by comparison.
At the least, Coffin Feeder are standing on their own within the latter half of the record, and while the gimmickry remains strong, we’re less Inception-level layers deep and more as single-minded as the inspiration for the music itself.
Big Trouble may have won the day by being our audio equivalent of slamming a bag of candy down our faces in one go. Coffin Feeder know that they’re making “party music” in that sort of way. It is surface-level interaction for a quick dopamine fix and one that can be used for that effect over and over again. While they are clearly on the same sonic highways as so many other bands – and stuck in the same bumper-to-bumper traffic it seems – it’s not that Coffin Feeder seem to care. They’re having fun with the audio bludgeonings taking place here and it is something that they’ve been building upon over their last few EPs.
Having settled on the macho weightlifting pop culture of days gone by is well-trod ground as well, so after a while you almost find yourself dismissing it in favor of the songs themselves. The song titles become null and void in favor of hammering drums and a veritable wall of guitar with the Sven and friends parade yelling over the top of it. Coffin Feeder are barging their way into a market void that has been filling rapidly over time already, and at the very least Big Trouble does make a solid statement for them being able to plant their feet there as well.
https://listenable-records.bandcamp.com/album/big-trouble
https://www.coffinfeederband.com/
https://www.facebook.com/coffinfeeder666
https://www.instagram.com/coffinfeedermetal/