Defeated Sanity - Psalms of the Moribund

I’ve been listening to Defeated Sanity for quite some time now. And honestly, I’ve never been hugely impressed by them. But it’s one of those things where I don’t love them, but I still listen to them quite often. This was the first album by them that I listened to. I listened to their first album (aka atrocity) and deleted it after the fourth song (for obvious reasons). Psalms of the Moribund is a HUGE improvement from their debut disaster, but it still doesn’t amount to much. But even though it doesn’t amount to much by my standards, Psalms of the Moribund sparked a major increase in Defeated Sanity’s popularity amongst the brutal death scene. I did a little research on the kinds of gigs that Defeated Sanity play and they’ve actually HEADLINED several FESTIVALS in Europe and have also had very high spots on American festivals!

Pretty much everything about Defeated Sanity fits the stereotypical description of your generic, typical brutal/slam death band. You have the inhaled vocals, the heavy distorted guitars, the blast beat drumming, and of course, the extremely offensive and disturbing album artwork (to the eyes of the mainstream). For the four years that I’ve been listening to these guys, I’ve tried time and time again to find something unique about them; but every time I’ve failed. Although there are TONS of “generic” brutal death bands that I listen to like Disentomb, Bloodboil, and Deeds of Flesh, there are certain things about this particular album that make it much more difficult for me to enjoy. The two main things that bother the FUCK out of me are that all the songs sound EXACTLY the same, and that there are key elements that are drowned out due to poor production work.

When I said “key elements” I meant the vocals. You have to listen closely to even hear that the vocals are even THERE! But it’s not like the guitars DROWN OUT the vocals, it’s just that they blend together so perfectly that they all sound like one thing, which irritates the hell out of me. And on top of that, the vocals don’t really sound that impressive to begin with. Not because they’re inhales, but because it just sounds like a constant inhaled growl changing pitch, I can’t even tell IF there are words involved (which is probably hypocritical because I enjoy bands like Eden Beast and Visceral Disgorge, who aren’t any easier to understand than these guys). But even with Visceral Disgorge, you can still tell that there are words involved and that there are consonants. So the vocals don’t come anywhere near to being satisfactory on my scale.

The drummer seems to be slipping out of time occasionally, but not NEARLY as much as on their first album; so that shows a huge improvement. His blast beats seem really disorganized and somewhat random at times (by random, I mean that it sounds like he’s just hitting random drums and cymbals instead of sticking to a certain pattern). But the blast beats aren’t all that the drummer pulls off, he does keep things interesting by going along closely with the guitars during some of the slower parts. Honestly, this is what I would consider an average death metal drummer; he’s good for the genre and can definitely improve, but there’s nothing special about him at all other than that he can double kick pretty fast.

Psalms of the Moribund is a HUGE improvement from their debut disaster, but it’s still not anywhere near something that I would donate money to obtain. This is understandable because they made an unbelievably huge improvement, so I’m not going to bash their efforts just because it’s still not good enough; that just means that they need to make ANOTHER huge improvement with their third album to make me give the thumbs-up (which is exactly what they did with Chapters of Repugnance). I would give this album 8/20.