ALBUM REVIEW: Deific Mourning – Decrepisy
Portland’s DECREPISY are perhaps one of US death metal’s most vile sounding and promising acts to emerge from the pacific north west in the last few years. Right from the bands debut album, Emetic Communion, the Oregon quartets modus operandi has been firmly established; huge, punishing rhythms, demented guitars and thick, intimidating vocals all combining to craft a brand of extremity that is unendingly sludgy and ominous, applying a sonic weight and unbridled heft to a classic death metal formula and breathing new life into this approach to the genre. Their second full length, Deific Mourning, is no different, and if anything leans into the harsher, bestial qualities of their debut and amplifies them, making their already fierce sounding even more savage.
Ceremony Of Unbelief kicks things off with a darkly atmospheric slab of death doom, with the rumbling undercurrent provided by the bass and drums being backed up by slick melodic touches and disjointed, eerie fills that lend this an interesting and distinct edge. The tar-thick gutturals complement the dense, claustrophobic quality of the rest of the music, helping to create a weighty and opaque sound that gradually morphs into a strident, ferocious piece of death metal, making for a powerful and monolithic start that approaches this style with its own impressive, unnerving twist.
Deific Mourning, with its slower build and tenser, drama-laden feel, and opts for a looser, abstract brand of musicianship that makes liberal use of dissonance, piercing distortion and bubbling cleaner moments that make this thoroughly eclectic. Much like the preceding offering, it’s centred upon impenetrable vocals, rhythmic hooks and well-placed jarring passages, with the end result being just as impactful, with a chaotic, urgent freneticism beginning to creep in as the song reaches its closing moments.
Dysautonomic Terror manages to balance the gargantuan groove of the previous two tracks with an equally visceral brand of riffs and a faster pace, seeing DECREPISY a livelier, aggressive take on the established template whilst retaining the murky, haunting mix that has made these songs as immersive as they are punishing. Spiritual Decay 1/4 Dead is a song of stark contrast, with the cavernous, sludgy bass lines, percussive drums and gruff growls being contrasted by stringent, biting leads that carve through the swampy production and inject an acidic, angular quality into this otherwise muscular and domineering effort.
Severed Ephemerality serves as perhaps the most accessible track on this album, with the intricate drumming, tighter guitars and greater emphasis on melody throughout continuing the over-arching sound of the last four tracks whilst refining it and embracing a slightly cleaner sound that accentuates this songs intricacies, tweaking the core approach that has worked so well to a focused, leaner style without stripping away the underlying sepulchral bombast.
Corpseless veers abruptly into a harsher sound that, despite being almost universally built upon crushing rhythms, does a great job of creating a feral, vitriolic feel into the music that makes it just as caustic at points as some of this records sharper riffing, helping to cement this as the album’s most primal number. Afterhours reverts to the kind of ponderous, slow-burning songwriting that has characterised some of this record’s best moments, and incorporating new components into the music, notably cleaner, chanting vocals that sees the music shift to a more hypnotic and expansive mode, being incredibly repetitive and trance-like for the most part. It’s far from one of the heaviest tracks on this album, but emphasises the sprawling atmospheres that DECREPISY are able to pull out of their music, with only a few discordant licks and the churning, seismic bass providing a sonic depth that anchors it to the intensity of the rest of the album and serving as a fitting climax to a fantastic record.
Although it’s clear that both are created by the same band, the musical differences between Emetic Communion and Deific Mourning are extremely stark. Where the former is firmly rooted in pure death metal, with a polished production, this seems to embrace a generous dose of doom into the mix, along with a greater emphasis on eerie, unnerving distortion, especially when it comes to the lead riffs, if anything regressing, rather than progressing, towards a punchier, accessible sound, instead accentuating rabid and claustrophobic undercurrents and making for a far dirtier, noxious offering than could have been achieved with a lighter, cleaner sound. It’s a robust, coarse juggernaut that crystallises the very best of DECREPISY‘s style and provides them with a crushing template to work from with their future music.
Rating: 8/10
Deific Mourning is out now via Carbonized Records.
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