Revocation - Existence is Futile

I’ve (unintentionally) seen Revocation three times as being the first band to play. Honestly, I think they’ve been at the bottom of the list long enough. Even though I was amazed by these guys while seeing them onstage, I kept forgetting to look them up until my friend got one of their CDs when he saw them open for Despised Icon. The CD happened to be their first album which is titled Empire of the Obscene. I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I think it’s one of the best debuts to come out since Gore Metal by Exhumed! And ever since then, Revocation has continued to raise the bar and reach new heights. Even though the two genres they fuse the most is thrash metal and death metal, they have all sorts of crazy shit going on in their music.

I’m going to jump right into my favorite thing about this album and that is that most of the guitar solos on this record sound like something from a 70s heavy metal/classic rock album! It doesn’t seem like something like that would be able to fit on a thrash death album, but it sounds amazing. Dismantle the Dictator and Anthem of the Betrayed have the best guitar solos on the record; and they always make me smile when I hear them because they bring back fond memories of when Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath was all I listened to. Along with that, there are hard rock and heavy metal sounds rooted deeply within the album that can be heard even in the rhythm guitars and the drums.

There are a few metalcore-styled breakdowns that pop out during some of the songs. The best one is during the intro of Leviathan Awaits when there is the breakdown being played by the bass and the drums while the lead guitar continues to hammer out the intro guitar line (which is one of my favorite types of breakdowns by the way). Because of the metalcore influence this album has, there is that vibe the record has that makes it perfect for headbanging.

The technicality of this album occasionally reaches inconceivable levels. These songs that are bursting at the seams with technicality and speed are what have made Revocation known to the world. Although I know technical skills alone isn’t enough to impress me, in this case it’s added on to a huge fudge cake of color, emotion, creativity, and inspiration; That is when technicality sounds best. I would like the guitars to have more of a crunchy sound but they recently fulfilled that need on their 2011 record, Chaos of Forms. So since they took care of my appetite for Revocation crunchiness, I’m not bothered by the lack of it on this record anymore.

Revocation is one of those bands that can be pretty hard to fully soak in within the first month of you listening to them. It really takes a while to fully take in their music and understand it. Although some of you might beg to differ with that statement, I know that there is at least one band that you had to listen to for a month or so before you could fully soak in their sound and understand them. Obviously you can tell that I am in love with this next to flawless record, and I’m not even going to list the flaws because they are so small and subtle that they’re pretty much unnoticeable. I would give this album 18/20.