Review Summary: Always boring and never fun, Birth of Depravity are one to avoid.
Brutal death metal is a genre that continues to surprise me. I’m absolutely floored by Katalepsy’s “Autopsychosis” – an album that contains some of the heaviest death metal in existence – and I’m left in awe at The Faceless’ Planetary Duality, an album that manages to balance so many different ideas that the final output is damn near perfect. With that being said, the amount of “good” bands in the genre is small, and the reputation of said genre is completely brought down by Brain Drill and latter day Deicide, to name two bands out of many.
And that brings us to Greece’s Birth of Depravity, whose newest record The Coming of the Ineffable is about as good and as fun as the country’s finances at the minute. Though the album offers ten songs in a little over thirty five minutes, how each song manages to feel twice its length is beyond me. The band call themselves “technical brutal death metal,” and as a result suffer the same problem as Brain Drill (remember how much you hated Quantum Catastrophe?) – Though the music offered here is impressive, it suffers from being both boring and forgettable. It’s not completely fair to compare Birth of Depravity with Brain Drill though – whilst both bands play a technical form of brutal death metal, Brain Drill place far more emphasis on the “technical” aspect whilst Birth of Depravity rely more on the “brutal” side. The album’s two longest tracks, Towers of Disillusion and Enslaved In Somnium respectively both reach nearly five minutes – three and a half too many minutes. If you want to listen to the whole album but you don’t have time, the album’s penultimate track Dehumanization By Hellfire (falling just short of two and half minutes) acts as a fantastic summary of everything beforehand, demonstrating the band’s mix of death metal riffs with incredibly technical fills that, whilst impressive, still come off as a slightly more technical Cannibal Corpse.
Sure, it’s heavy, but so what? It’s not like you haven’t heard it a million times before.
It’s not like the production of the album does the band any favours either. As a result of the murky production, the heavier chugs that the band employs sound weak and overall the album lacks any particular power behind it. Not even with Greg behind the mic can Birth of Depravity be saved – his growls are constantly monotonous throughout, again reminiscent of Chris Barnes or any other number of generic death metal vocalists.
As a death metal fan you’re far better off with Russian tech-wizards Katalepsy or Italy’s completely slamtastic Vulvectomy. Sure, Vulvectomy might be brain dead death metal, but at least it’s fun – and that counts for something, right?
