Insidious Decrepancy is a one-man technical death band that has continued to amaze me ever since I first saw “them” live in 2010. Although solo in the studio, there is a drummer present during live shows (for obvious reasons). Some would assume that the sole member uses a drum machine in the studio like Purtrid Pile, but he actually plays a real drum set! I mean, tech death by itself is hard enough to play on just one instrument; but to be able to play it on guitar, bass, vocals, AND drums?? That’s something that even I have a hard time believing. So I found this record a couple of months ago and it’s one of the most traditional (or “generic) tech death albums I’ve heard so far (yes, I know about Psycroptic, Origin, Necrophagist, Brain Drill, etc.). But since I have yet to be “worn out” by the generic technical death sound, this is a record that I have had the pleasure to thoroughly enjoy.
The production quality is exactly what I would expect from an underground death metal (of any kind) band. Not as much bass as I would like to hear (you know I’m a stickler about that), but at least there’s not a complete absence of it, so it’s understandable. The drums sound shitty unless you go see them live, the kick drums sound more like clicking rather than that powerful booming punch that I like to get bombarded with. In most of the underground death metal albums I’ve heard, there seems to always be one or two songs that use the same guitar riff for the entire song that gets annoying very quickly. This has even happened in some albums released by bigger name bands like Committed from Origin’s 2011 album, 10,000 Sermons, 1 Solution from SWWAATS’ 2009 album, and some others that I can’t think of at the moment. The song that bothers me the most on Extirpating Omniscient Certitude is the guitar/bass riff that takes up the majority of the first track. Thankfully, it doesn’t take up the entire duration of the song.
Other than that, Extirpating Omniscient Certitude (say that five times fast) is filled with some of the most complex creativity I’ve ever heard come out of a single person’s head. It’s more understandable when there’s an entire band involved writing unimaginably technical music (like Obscura, Rings of Saturn, Arsis, etc.), but having one single person come up with just about all of it is pretty wild. This very tall and very skinny metal musician is someone that doesn’t deserve the amount of attention that he’s been getting. But then again, maybe he’s perfectly satisfied and happy right where he is in the underground world (I would be happy there as well to be honest). But in the underground world, everyone knows the name Insidious Decrepancy (or has heard the name at least once). Because someone with this much talent and musical skill should be replacing famous and less-deserving bands like Emmure, Chelsea Grin, Job for a Cowboy, and Meshuggah.
The vocals aren’t my favorite thing about this record. It’s almost assumed that an underground death metal band uses inhaled vocals. Well, just like most of the other underground brutal metal bands, Insidious Decrepancy uses…wait for it…INHALED GROWLS, how surprising! But that’s not the thing that REALLY bugs me, the thing that really bugs me is that they don’t sound that good…at all. I do think that inhaled growls is what this album requires in order to have the best sound (which happens in several situations, nothing wrong with that), but this album calls for deeper, more guttural growls rather than a semi-pig squeal with some body. Other than that, this album is very impressive.
Although this is nowhere near being my favorite tech death band/album, this is something that I would recommend to you. But here’s a disclaimer: the people that will get the most enjoyment out of this are the people that are already very familiar with the technical death genre and plenty of it’s more famous bands (Arsis, Obscura, Decapitated, The Faceless, Decrepit Birth, The Black Dahlia Murder, etc.) and a good share of the genre’s underground scene (Rings of Saturn, Embryonic Devourment, Dystrophic, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Brain Drill, etc.). I would score this album 16/20.
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