RSS Feed


DEVANGELIC
Resurrection Denied

Comatose Music (2014)
Rating: 6/10

Hammering their way out of Rome comes brutal death metallers Devangelic, who come armed to the teeth with debut experience Resurrection Denied.

The quartet is one not to be messed with, and features vocalist Paolo Chiti, guitarist Mario Di Giambattista, drummer Alessandro “Venders” Santilli, and bassist Damiano Bracci – Bracci joined the band in February 2013, replacing David Cetorelli six months after their August 2012 formation.

Now, I’ll keep things simple here. Devangelic play a hammering style of death metal with shades of grindcore, and that comes to the fore in the guttural vocal technique of Chiti, who spends most of his time coughing up fur-balls from the inner depths of his chest cavity. While he’s puking up his sphincter, the trio behind him rattles, bangs, hammers, clanks, clatters, crashes and rallies with such intrusive force that Devangelic end up giving birth to nine putrid offspring.

The best looking of these is the violently swayed ‘Eucharist Savagery’; a track that causes severe injuries with its scattering drums, which rain down upon the flesh like lethal lumps of discarded debris. Intriguingly, the whole barrage is glued together by not necessarily blasting from the guitar and bass. Instead, they work in tandem as an equivalent of a gigantic stone wall topped with troops ready to slay any trespassers with that rapid-fire ammo. So, in other words, the guitar and bass works as a thickening melody beneath the smattering of hasty drums while the tweaking, twinge of the leads escapes from the fortress like a deadly gas.

‘Crown Of Entrails’ continues the terrifying trend; it batters the ears, skull and eventually the rest of the body with those bone-shattering drum clicks and triggers, all the while providing a hint of dense melody with those weaving, meandering guitar tones which snake with extreme weight throughout.

It could be argued that Devangelic’s material is rather bereft of variety in the sense that each track follows a similar path. Death metal of this ilk can be a rather frustrating cacophony at times, if only for its focus on blistering drums and those chesty vocals which rarely deviate from their battering ram formula. Although the likes of ‘Disfigured Embodiment’ are more than happy to slow the tempo, it all still becomes one long track in a sense rather than an album of separate joys.

Vocally, this stuff is borderline for me in that it loiters around that realm of grindcore messiness where the indecipherable chops tend to become an instrument rather than a voice. While I’m thankful there are no pig-like squeals in sight, by the time tracks such as ‘Unfathomed Evisceration’ and ‘Perished Through Atonement’ have passed through the system, I’m unsure if there’s any real difference between them.

Resurrection Denied is a rather short yet not so sweet delivery from one of the up and coming bands of the brutal death metal void. In spite of its rather blunt approach and no frills barrage, it’s a piece of work that will no doubt interest those with a liking for the more extreme avenues of the death metal scene.

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share