This album by Englishmen Desecration has the big flaw of starting out with a few seconds of bare drum beats without any backing string instruments. I consider this a flaw becouse the sound of the drums on this album is really atrocious, worthy of the worse Vomit Remnants or Infected Malignity. That said, one has to clarify that the music itself is oddly totally different from what one could expect from the drum sound, as we don’t have routine “cold” star and stripes Brutal Death Metal like the Japanese do. Desecration play a good mxcture of Death and a touch of Grind with raw guitar sound and growling vocals. Ollie’s vocals are excellent and possibly the best thing in the album : ogre-deep at times, at others phlegmy and disgusting or even piglike. The riffs themselves are not always top notch, the mid tempo power chords placed at regular intervals in every song are a bit too “aggro” “Machine Head” for my delicate tastes, but in general I have managed to appreciate the album from start to finish – there is also a good share of relentless accelerations and incomprehensible grunts which generally raise the heaviness of the work. I don’t remember much of the previous albums but I remember I liked the 7″ quite a bit – I cannot really trace any parallel right now. All I want to stress is that I would really appreciate if they cut away all this terrible stop and go palm muting stuff, it’s really unnecessary.
The idea of writing an album on the concept of a decomposing body reminds me of The Todeskings (the cult Buttgereit movie dedicated to Death and decomposition), and reading the singer Ollie has some professional first hand experience on the file of dead bodies, I assume the lyrics could have been an interesting read. We don’t often read true English people writing lyrics. Pity.
The cover art and layout are also quite appalling, garish and plain, with wrongly placed graphic elemnts, terrible cheap photoshop effects, and grossly depixelated pictures. Epitomite should consider changing graphic artist.
