Review Summary: Riffs galore and wonderful lead work can't mask the mixture of songwriting issues that come from conflicting goals.
Swedish death metal group Diabolical have swapped musical styles several times over their long career, veering from melodeath to death-thrash and now to
Behemoth-style blackened death metal. The Gallery of Bleeding Art is their thrashiest release and features an enjoyable degree of technicality with a sprinkling of the epic/atmospheric influences they would fully employ on later albums, and while it has several enjoyable tracks, the conflict between their simpler writing style and their more ambitious intentions causes major issues.
On the surface this album has a lot of strengths, primary among them the incredible riffs that are nimble and hooky in the best possible way. They're not technical in the somewhat predictable tech-death way, and the guitarists manage to throw in some simple and crushing inverted powerchords and other less flashy elements at opportune times. Leads are frequent and reasonably flashy, propelling many sections and giving a reasonable level of dynamism for all the tracks. The drums aren't amazing but are absolutely sufficient, likewise the bass, but the vocals are great and have a decent amount of range and are arranged well to maximise their impact, sometimes something death metal bands struggle with. The production is also very good, modern enough to feel clean and tidy but not overproduced or tiring.
The issues arise with about half the tracks feeling a bit aimless and unnecessarily long. With the strengths of the band, the ideal song lengths would be around 4-5 minutes; the title track,
Pavor Nocturnus and
The One Who Bleeds exhibit this, as all three tracks feel around the ideal length and with the requisite number of different parts to stay fresh and interesting. The title track especially is very dynamic both in tempo and in style, and is pretty much the ideal intro for the album. Unfortunately, the following track
Extinction drags, and whilst its main riff is excellent, it repeats it ad nauseum, wasting its potency.
Vertigo has similar issues with repetition, and unlike Extinction it doesn't really have a strong hook to fall back on, and as a result drags heavily; the more atmospheric elements crop up in this track, but while in later material they work, the overall sound here is a bit underdeveloped and those parts distract from the better strength of the riffs. By the time the latter half of the track steps things up, it's unfortunately a bit too boring to engage with. The shorter
Religionism likewise struggles to really hook the listener, with several riffs that would impress as bridge parts, but not really finding a core hook or motif that differentiates it the way Extinction or the stronger tracks do.
Ironically, the longest track is probably the most interesting, albeit certainly not exactly a smooth ride.
Ashes IV has several brilliant riffs, especially the
Opeth-esque chords near the end, and the rapidly changing pace of its intro gives it an arresting quality, but it gets a bit bogged down by a gimmicky stop-start part, and sometimes its rapid shifts cause the opposite problem of feeling disjointed and a little muddled. That said, it's still a pretty strong track, although compared to the organized rapid-fire intensity of Pavor Nocturnus or the lead-driven title track and The One Who Bleeds it doesn't perform as well.
The conflicting directions of this album overall result in only about half the tracks really sticking the landing. The thrashier, faster tracks pretty much nail the necessary levels of complexity and employ the more atmospheric elements more sparingly, maximising the strengths of both, but the slower tracks like
Vertigo feel too stodgy and dull to keep up the pace. In general, compared to later efforts, the atmospheric elements feel more like a distraction than a worthwhile pursuit, and as a result this album stumbles in more spots than it probably should. Regardless, the strong tracks here are legitimately very good, and the pace of the album is at least organized in a way that there aren't 2 weaker tracks grouped together between the better ones at any point. As a result, this album is a reasonably enjoyable curiosity that should satisfy any death-thrash cravings, but fails its deeper aspirations.
