Hailing from country town of Nanago in South East Qld, Disentomb have come a long way carrying the torch for heavy heaving technical death metal for their home town, and after last album Misery saw the band attack stages around the world have they gone one step better and made a world beater of an album?
The short answer is no. The music on display is surely nothing to be sneezed at, but as The Decaying Light plays through, everything begins to blend into a frenzy of varying levels of cacophonous suffocating sounds, with a very dry album mix allowing everything to be clear but at times overdone.
This may well be the band’s plan, so vividly pointed out on ‘Indecipherable Sermons Of Gloom’, a track that tacks everything Disentomb can do and jams it into a four minute death metal ride that essentially goes nowhere, swirling around but never reaching a memorable riff. Things get more interesting in the second half of the album, as the band begin to play around more with their overly bog standard formula on ‘Dredged Into Existence’, ‘The Droning Monolith’ and beyond, ending on instrumental closer ‘Withering’ where all the chaos fades away in washes of clean guitar.
It isn’t often that an album is back loaded so heavily with its best material. It does leave the listener feeling a sense of accomplishment after battling through the first 20 minutes or so to get to the soft flesh, showing what greatness this band are more than capable of. But in a willingness to show more power than was required, their vision is lost in the dust. Listen to the this in reverse order and there is still a lot to take in, but there are more memorable parts that will have you going again.
- Collapsing Skies
- Your Prayers Echo Into Nothingness
- Indecipherable Sermons of Gloom
- Undying Dysphoria
- Centuries of Deluge
- The Decaying Light
- The Great Abandonment
- Dredged Into Existence
- The Droning Monolith
- Dismal Liturgies
- Invocation in the Cathedral of Dust
- Rebirth Through Excoriation
- Withering
