The third album by Poland’s DECAPITATED is an eyebrow-singeingly impressive blast of the state of the death metal art.
The pattern is laid down from opening track "The Fury" – a doomy intro blazes into a vicious explosion of blastbeats (for those unfamiliar with the glossary of the genre, a blastbeat is pretty much exactly as it sounds – the drums hammering away at such a speed that it sounds as though the CD has stuck) with lightning-fingered riffing welded on.
This is music for rabid cyborgs, where only the eerie drone of "Calling" – and this is really only a glorified intro - offers any respite. Riffs hammer away with Terminator precision, barked vocals double up as percussion (Beelzebub alone knows what is actually being sung), making for a fearsome whole that sounds like Fear Factory shorn of the unnecessary melodic choruses (although the title track isn’t unhummable, in a psychotic sort of way).
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The immaculately calibrated playing is all the more impressive for coming from ones so young - the band (vocalist Sauron, guitarists Vogg and Hiro, drummer Vitek and bassist Martin, who clearly skipped the School of Rock on the day of the ‘death metal names’ exam) are barely into their twenties.
Music of this intensity can often be exhausting to listen to, but at a brisk thirty minutes long, this makes its point with lethal concision before departing for the hellish hinterlands from which it sprung.
In this age of virulently proliferating pop punk and ironic rock, Decapitated stop our eardrums from becoming complacent.
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