ALBUM REVIEW: Irreversible – Deitus
Since their formation in 2004, York’s DEITUS have been one of the most consistently impressive acts with the UK’s black metal scene. With their core melodic black metal sound, which also draws influence from elements of hard rock and thrash, the band’s first two albums – 2016’s Acta Non Verba and 2018’s Via Dolorosa – established the trio as one of the best new acts to come out of the UK since the turn of the millennium. Now, four and half years since their last record was released, the band are back with their third full-length Irreversible, an album that brings together all of the best ingredients that made their first two albums so great, crafting perhaps their tightest and most varied work to date.
Incursion starts proceedings with a darkly atmospheric, jarring track with a strong thrash undercurrent, punctuated by slick, melodic leads and a martial beat, setting the tone for what’s to come before Straight For Your Throat bursts into life. This captures many of the monolithic qualities of the album’s opener and adds grating rhythms, acerbic vocals and lots of energetic, rabid flourishes that take a lot of their musical cues from classic black metal, whilst possessing a crisp production and polished approach that allows the subtler elements to come to the fore. It perfectly blends the harsher and lighter moments together, with the result serving as a majestic and savage slab of punchy blackened thrash.
A Scar For Serenity eschews the slow-burning style of the preceding tracks in favour of a belligerent, angular sound centred around caustic guitar work, venom-soaked vocals and galloping drums, proving to be a sharper track that has a fiercer pace that helps to make this even more intense, making room for some incredibly catchy leads with a confident, hard rock swagger. Irreversible lurches back towards the cavernous, doomier sound that defined the album’s first two tracks, with hypnotic hooks and soaring, acidic vocals injecting a sinister feel into the music, without straying out of its more measured tempo, allowing the grandiose melodicism of the guitars to provide a lot of this song’s best moments, rather than opting for outright aggression. This has some of the most imaginative and intricate riffs on the whole record, which helps to make this fairly lengthy piece of music seem far shorter and more impactful.
Voyeur is another change of pace, this time to a hazier, more experimental offering with brooding ambience and haunting female vocals, along with the kind of dissonant guitars that were hinted at earlier on in the album, stylistically departing from the lean, focused sound that has dominated up to this point in favour of an opaque, borderline avant-garde number that stands out for all the right reasons. As Long As They Fear does a great job of tying together the lighter components of the previous track’s sound with the denser, nauseating blackened thrash that was present on the album’s first half. Adventurous, inspired guitar and vocal performances clash with the shroud-like atmospherics that add a depth and angelic aspect to the muscular, rhythmic undercurrent, with the end result being arguably the album’s most bombastic effort, serving as the perfect climax to a fantastic record.
Considering that the band already have two excellent albums under their belt, topping just one, let alone both of them, was always going to be difficult, but with Irreversible, DEITUS have managed to surpass their earlier work and produced something that stands as arguably their most ambitious and impressive output thus far. In fact, this album brilliantly brings together the best musical elements that were present in both Acta Non Verba and Via Dolorosa, capturing the raw intensity of the former and the more polished, virtuosic musicianship of the the latter, with a few subtle experimental flourishes added for good measure, something that will hopefully be explored a little more thoroughly in the future. But perhaps most importantly, Irreversible has firmly cemented DEITUS as one of the stand out acts within the British black metal underground.
Rating: 9/10
Irreversible is out now via Candlelight Records.
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