ALBUM REVIEW: The Experimendead – Inhuman Depravity
INHUMAN DEPRAVITY‘s 2015 debut album, Nocturnal Carnage By The Unholy Desecrator, was an incredibly strong start for the Turkish brutal death metallers, showcasing an amazingly tight and fully formed sound for a band that had, at that point, been active for only a couple of years. It boasted a lot of solid music and plenty of promise for the Istanbul based quartet. Now, over seven years since they unleashed their debut, and with a new vocalist and bassist, the band return with The Experimendead, a record that, despite being stylistically similar to its predecessor, displays the band at arguably not only their best, but also their most creative and imaginative to date.
Obsessed With The Mummified is an incredibly strong start to the record, launching straight into an absolutely ferocious whirlwind of caustic guitars, precise drums and abrasive vocals which blend together a brutal death undercurrent with dizzying technicality to result in a domineering and aggressive opening salvo. Mescannibalismus, with its rhythmic, intense sound, retains the punishing percussion, monstrous riffs and dense gutturals, along with visceral lead guitars and bubbling basslines which add a demented edge to proceedings that help to make this sound impressively inventive.
Burnt To Exist has a great, acidic side to its guitar sound that cuts through the relatively groove-laden core of the guitars and bass, peppering the music with jarring elements that, alongside the frenetic drumming and unhinged vocals, makes this track oftentimes unpredictable without distracting from the meaty sections that make up its backdrop. Whole Body Radiation slows the pace significantly, gradually gathering momentum and morphing into a rabid slab of brutal death metal, and making the music seem far more sinister and ominous than the three preceding tracks. It’s got a huge, muscular sound courtesy of the guitars, bass and vocals, with energetic drums injecting a persistent sense of urgency into the fray for a decidedly dramatic feel.
The album’s second half kicks off with As I Tell You To Kill So, a weighty juggernaut with a more pronounced slam influence that sees the music ebb and flow between monolithic chugging and chaotic blasts of bestial ferocity. It’s a track of extremes, both in terms of style and pace, and it’s a varied and gripping song as a consequence. Death 22 sees the band lean heavily into their tech death influences, with virtuosic performances from the guitar and especially the bass, which punctuates the general cacophony of the music with brief, sludgy bursts which contrast from the noxious mix of grating guitar hooks, tight drums and powerful vocals, pummelling the listener and making it arguably the album’s harshest offering.
Ex Nihilo Transition, the album’s penultimate track, is a short sharp shock of aggressive and discordant death metal, matching the previous track pound for pound in terms of intensity and aggression, with the focused, dissonant melodicism of the guitars and emotive vocals contributing a menacing aura. It serves as a definitive, climactic statement, and sets the listener up for the album’s closing effort Beyond Rhythm Zero perfectly. This final, belligerent aural assault captures the band’s most extreme elements well; the eclectic, frenzied guitar work on here is exceptional, as are the drums, which are administered with pinpoint precision, with animalistic gutturals providing the exclamation point on what turns out to be a fantastic, visceral conclusion.
The Experimendead has all of the core ingredients that go into the best brutal death metal, from the unerring ferocity to the sudden, lurching changes in pace and style that make it hard to predict not just from song to song, but minute to minute. But there’s a few subtle elements spread throughout this record that set it apart from the pack and make it more than just another brutal death metal release. The guitars, whilst possessing much of the density and primal aggression that this style requires throughout, have a generous dose of slicker, melodic hooks with a more polished feel to them, something that is often neglected when it comes to the harder end of death metal. The seven years since the release of their debut has clearly seen the band refine and tighten their sound, leaving only the leanest and punchiest elements behind, and it’s evident from the marked leaps forward made on this album that this band are reaching their creative zenith, to the point that album number three could very well see INHUMAN DEPRAVITY establish themselves as one of the world’s premier brutal death metal acts.
Rating: 8/10
The Experimendead is set for release on September 9th via Gruesome Records.
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