Decapitated - Negation

I personally think that this album is Decapitated’s major breakthrough album (in other words, every album that has been released after this one so far has been really good). I’m not going to talk too much about their history because I go on enough about it in my reviews of their first two records. I will say that by this time, Decapitated was rarely opening for other bands; they were headlining pretty much every show and tour they played. My complaint about their album previous to this one is a major lack of originality that is overtaken by a sound that relates to that of Meshuggah. Although this album still has a strong Meshuggah influence, the music doesn’t revolve completely around it; it’s Decapitated, but with a hint of Meshuggah.

It was this album that really turned me on to Decapitated. After Organic Hallucinosis, I got the rest of their albums in chronological order and wasn’t fully impressed until I played this one. Although I would still consider this band the least technical tech death band, I guess the drumming makes up for the simple guitar work. You can tell that in their second album, there was an increase in drug use because that’s what the majority of the lyrics are about, and that is even more apparent in Negation.

Unfortunately, this is the last album to feature “Pig” on vocals. I personally think that Pig was the best vocalist Decapitated has ever had. But although the rest of the band loved his growls, he was eventually fired from the band for some reason that I can’t find. It’s funny because after Pig departed, they burned through almost four vocalists before settling with their current vocalist in 2009.

My favorite song from this album is undoubtedly Three-Dimensional Defect. The song having a breakdown-like tempo leading into blast beat drumming and deep, powerful trembolo-picked guitars is a piece that is what is known as a metalhead’s dream. The guitar distortion doesn’t have a crunchy sound like you would expect from a European tech death band. It actually has a really smooth sound, but you can still hear the edginess of the distortion; it just sounds more controlled and high-quality compared to other European technical death groups.

Except for Behemoth, all of the Polish metal bands I listen to I discovered somehow through Decapitated. I guess mainly because of clicking the links of the other bands the Decapitated members have been involved in on Spirit of Metal. Some of those bands that I’ve discovered include Sceptic, Key to Nowhere, Vader (yes, that Vader), Thunderbolt, Vesania, Lux Occulta, Totem, Anal Stench, and the thrash metal band Virgin Snatch. Honestly, Behemoth still remains my favorite Polish band (mainly because I’m a black metal guy). But I do feel that even though they weren’t around in the early 1990s, Decapitated stands as one of the most influential death metal bands Europe has ever produced.

The lyrical themes really took on the direction of drug-induced psychedelic themes. The vocals are higher pitched than in Winds of Creation. The drummer also progresses by using lots of highly creative and powerful blast beats with tons of bass on the kick drums so that you can feel them pounding when you turn up the bass on your speakers. So far, this is the album with the best sound quality that Decapitated has ever put out. This album is definitely a classic in my book and deserves my score of 17/20.