It seems that death metal has never exactly been a facile affair; down-tuning your guitar to cloacal lows, having your drummer pummel the double-bass at lightning speeds and a vocalist squealing like a pig is simply not enough to dub you as extreme. With the mighty Death setting the scene of technical death some 15 years ago and Suffocation taking death/grind to a whole new innovative plateau, technical proficiency has been raised to an extremely heightened caliber in this selective niche since then. Such is the case with the Polish death metal powerhouse that is Decapitated. What with their unique technical take on the genre and their un-paralleled instrumental exploitation, they have attained a high profile status in the European death metal scene. Picking up from the same tangent that saw them digressing from their early albums on ‘The Negation’, ‘Organic Hallucinosis’ integrates neck-snapping, high-precision time changes and layered staccato riffing to transform it into one highly convoluted slab of death metal. As the first track comes blasting through, clear and sharp bass lines scaffold around the compositions while a hailstorm of blast-beats rampages through our auditory synapses. Unsurprisingly, their blistering sound turns out to be far from monolithic, never dawdling on one passage or tempo for too long. A new vocalist, namely Covan, has jumped on the Decapitated wagon, replacing Sauron. In comparison, Covan is more reminiscent of that angry, belligerent tone that characterizes a hardcore vocalist rather than a death metal one and unluckily, doesn’t quite fit the ticket in the Decapitated camp. In summation putting all impediments aside, Decapitated’s cold, mechanistic delivery, saturated in weird harmonics and intricate drum-fills, might not do well for fans of their more straight-forward early output but nonetheless it stands well on its own as a quality death metal release.
(originally written for Tartarean Desire - 2006?)
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