You know that feeling, when your heart beats like a double-bass drum assault when you find an album that's different from the currently followed modern trends? Well, that feeling has struck me several times, especially during the last month and the most recent heart beater is Brazil's Escarnium. Most of the recent death metal emerges from well-known countries like Sweden or the US but Brazil was a bit unexpected. Nonetheless, thinking of the savagely murderous scene of Brazillian death/thrash came to my mind, and for an instant I felt like I could hug the album with closed eyes, without any hesitation at all. Escarnium did not necessarily fail to amuse me with their crazed, frantic album, but I was just expecting something more off the wall, rather than the similar Incantation worshipping done once again.
Incantation and perhaps some Deicide. That's the shortest way to discribe what's going on in this album. On one hand I was quite displeased with what I heard at the beginning, because I had expected a less derivative and sound from Brazil, but on the other hand I couldn't help notice how elaborately the band had worked on the riffs, managing to sound like Incantation and alike, bordering to Incantation territory quite frequently. Incantation-esque tremolos come like a rain of arrows on this album, with the same dark atmosphere providing tinges of glooming misery at the same time. While the sector of originality may be extremely futile, I have to give credit to the band for assaulting the listener almost constantly with velocious and brutal riffage. The drums batter and slam almost non-stop and the tremolo riffs shape and descend within their own dim space, so that that the music flows with no negation until the very end. ''Self Proclaimed Messiah'' is one utterly pulverising mid stomper, having its nimble moments as common as its moments of doomy, sludgy crawls. The vocals blend in to the tremolo chugs in a super easy way, and thus still managing to be audiable and excruciating. The bass lines are perfectly audiable as well and they support the heft of the riffage in every single moment.
The album may seldom take shapes and turn into horrifying, ghastly monstrosities-another common trait found in Incantation's music. The riffs are all blunt and smothered evoking the effect of evil rather than dynamicism and the percussion is great, may be not very variant but still absolutely crushing the whole way. All this covers pretty much all of the general traits of the album. The aspects could have used some more contrast but once again I must state tham I'm forever humble to the eternally numbing effect of the smothered riffage, no matter how infinite they may seem. The only one thing I could suggest to these Brazillian death metallers is that the album could have used some of their predecessors primal savagery and energy, and once that is attained and put in place the upcoming album will sound even better than this, not that this is a bad album, but it just had some flaws.
Highlights:
Covered In Decadence
731
Excruciating Existence
Rating: 88,5%
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