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DECIMATION
Reign Of Ungodly Creation

Comatose Music (2014)
Rating: 7/10

For a band so technical in its brutality, I’m surprised that Turkey’s Decimation didn’t opt for a more intriguing band moniker. This trio has been around since 1999 and Reign Of Ungodly Creation is their third full-length outing, coming some four years after 2010’s Anthems Of An Empyreal Dominion.

Now, this is a band that most certainly likes to dabble in the complex side of metal – offering up such song titles in the past as ‘Sardonic Equilibrium Decree Humiliating Imkhullu’, ‘Peripheral Profligacy Of Transcendental Lower World’ and ‘Uncircumscribed Delinquency At The Gates Of Anu’ – so it’s no surprise then that this time around the theme of technicality continues.

We’re treated to such gems as ‘Noncelestical Orisons Cataclised In The Passage Of Ninib’, ‘Mystic Transformation In Encrypted Scrolls Of A Grievous Sermon’ and ‘Aberrant Ablution By Filthy Excrements Of A Grotesque Crassamentum’. It’s all very bizarre indeed, but it’s all part of the package as Decimation offers up some fiendishly guttural technical death metal which this time around feels a lot more accomplished and certainly lengthier than the previous effort.

Complete with Dan Seagrave artwork, Reign Of Ungodly Creation successfully mixes blast-beat coated death metal with the more engaging slower segments of complexity, all of which tend to result in being a battering ram that ought to feel more bewildering than it actually is. Sadly, at times anyway, it feels that the instruments appear muffled, almost blending into one another so that the vocal coughs are hard to distinguish from the triggering drums and dense, brooding guitar sound.

With these sorts of albums – y’know, the kind which want to express their cleverness – I expect each instrument to jar the soul, extract marrow, snip sinews, and stretch membranes, but Decimation has always failed to escape from the fact that the sound appears rather drowned. And so what we get is a rather dull affair that is often catchy but unable to pose arrogantly as some complicated spectre of metal.

As the titles become more and more absurd (‘Prophetic Despise Under The Pendulum Of A Sacrilegious Throne’, ‘Devilish Domain Vortex In The Gloom Of Wicked Ziggurat’), the less complex and cosmic the album actually becomes – the percussion being a constant cosmic factor of energy but yet to a degree exhibiting some repetition, in spite of some truly memorable passages such as with ‘Mystic Transformation In Encrypted Scrolls Of A Grievous Sermon’.

This is not the most extra-terrestrial offering you’ll hear, the band seemingly content with dressing up matters with a flashiness which rarely rears its head. When the band is fast they rarely construct a wall of inaccessibility, the best of the barrages being ‘Aberrant Ablution By Filthy Excrements Of A Grotesque Crassamentum’, but again offers more as a slower, weightier groove.

So, I’m kind of intrigued yet disappointed knowing full well that these guys can sure offer a catchy melody, but seem bogged down by an almost cosy production where everything appears as rather harmless. Maybe Decimation has found that elusive niche between quizzical extreme metal and catchiness, but when someone offers up these sort of titles then I really want to be bamboozled and perplexed rather than comforted.

Neil Arnold

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