Brutally Deceased
Satanic Corpse
(Doomentia Records)
It’s important to try and collapse all outside forces, bitter squabbles, and harrowing ugliness when partaking in escapism. This often-maligned ideology of sorts, can in fact lead to doors that unlock truer quality and higher avenues of thoughts. I sort of look at death metal in this way—not in any the way you escape to death metal—but in the way I escape to death metal. It’s about presence, about inner growth, and about the unique path you travel towards to find your inner light. Beneath all tactile impressions, death metal is about spirit. The good bands cannot for the life of them cover their shining auras with grotesque and imaginary dread—no, they’re way to bright for that shit.
Czech Republic’s burly, yet melodic thumpers Brutally Deceased strike a sort of stunted photosynthesis on their newest album Satanic Corpse. The record has many brilliant passages, many enduring sprouts, often equating to larger and greener stems, but overall the album usually shrinks at this hardening transformation. The band is not completely sure of their own structure, finding comfort in a familiar soil and a steady supply of light through a local window. Problem is, with such consistent balance and irregular jaunts at true inspiration, the band never truly transfers. And that is where the point of beyond lies—where the light that can’t be seen exists.
Take the tack “Hostile Earth”, a real progressive and neatly constructed number that starts off wicked. It has a new pattern, a dueling guitar cross-action that is inspired, lighted, and deep. The song sort of falls towards a familiar and overly done syntax when it stretches out though, banging into tired sections and cropped takes. This doesn’t mean the song doesn’t rule, because it does. If you were walking down the aisle in your local city coop, and this song started blasting across the loud speakers, there’d be crushed boxes of wheat flakes and larabars all over the place. A brilliant thrash.
But if you listen to a shit ton of death metal chances are you’ve heard this type of stuff before, and well, that’s just how it goes. It makes bands like Deceptionist and Behold…The Arctopus stand out that much more. Not because of style, or technique, or anything particularly material at all, but because of a spirit—a spirit that tries to outgrow its stalks, move past its physical limitations, and tries to find a truer light. Satanic Corpse is a good record, but not a great one.
