The Black Dahlia Murder - Deflorate

I pre-ordered this album after reading an article written by the producer/mixer of this album that said that this was The Black Dahlia Murder’s best album yet. By this time, I had been listening to this band for almost two years and had become quite familiar with their music and their history. When the CD appeared in my mailbox, I instantly opened it and saw that it had one of the weirdest album covers I had ever seen at the time. I left everything else in the mailbox, ran inside, put the disc in the CD player in my room, and locked the door. I was in my room for about two and a half hours because I re-played the CD maybe 2 or 3 times.

Two years later, it’s time I told you people about my experience listening to this album. So after changing into a new pair of pants, I decided to listen to the album again, but with more of a critical point of view. A lot of people that got an early listen like I did said that this is The Black Dahlia Murder’s best album. Although I don’t particularly agree with that statement, I do think that it deserves a perfect score in my book.

The band decided to turn up the tempo a bit with this album; with more blast beat drumming, faster trembolo picking, and more complex bass lines. It also seems that they got a new guitarist a little bit before they started writing the songs of this album, which is what I think had an influence in the more aggressive and faster musical style. I think that this is a great direction for TBDM to go, but it isn’t something that they should stick to for too long because it’ll get old pretty fast.

I’m not sure what song is the most well-known song off this album, but I do know that this is the first TBDM album to reach the Billboard 200 charts, which is actually very rare for a death metal album. But my favorite songs off of the album are “Black Valor”, “Necropolis”, and “Christ Deformed”; all of which they played when I saw them for the second time at the 2011 Summer Slaughter Tour. At that show, the crowd was huge and absolutely uncontrollably wild; there was constant crowd surfing, stage diving, moshing, tit flashing, and headbanging.

The lyrics in this album step away from the horror/murder themed stories to more of an abstract science fiction realm. I like how Trevor is experimenting with different lyrical themes because it shows that he gets bored easily with screaming the same type of stories and it also keeps it interesting for the listener.

Deflorate will always go down as one of my favorite tech death albums (although not quite as good as Nocturnal). This is a record that will not be forgotten easily. If you haven’t heard this album yet, I would recommend listening to the first two songs before hearing anything else because I feel that those are the songs that have the best description of the album. Even though this isn’t as good as Nocturnal, I still give it 20/20.