Following up on a sequence of four short releases that surfaced over the last six years, the Indiana death metal band Desekryptor have at last recorded a debut album. Aptly entitled Vortex Oblivion, it’s now set for release by Blood Harvest Records on July 14th.
The record is indeed a lethal death metal vortex, both ghastly and gutting — merciless in its bone-smashing force, terrorizing in the violence of its convulsions, disturbing in its moods of monstrous malignancy and abject agony — and yet freakishly elaborate and dynamic in its mauling permutations. It’s the kind of music that not only rewards repeat listening but demands it, to fully appreciate all the twists and turns in the cavalcade of horrors it presents.
In other words, there is ingenuity and intrigue to be found within these hideous cataclysms, and an impressive talent for melding both old school influences and newer-school adventurousness, executed with equally impressive technical skill, which even the density of all the subterranean mangling and mauling doesn’t completely obscure.
We’ve got two prime examples of these qualities in “Festering Ulceration“, the album track we’re premiering today, and “Abysmal Resurrection“, the album’s first single that we’re also sharing.
We turn first to “Festering Ulceration“. For most of the song’s run-time (though not all of it) it’s a savage, mind-mutilating assault. But while its depredations are ruthless for tender ears, attentive ears will also be intrigued.
For example, Desekryptor have managed to make the bass sound as if it were recorded in an enormous sewer pipe. It booms, undulates, and thrusts in reverberating tones that are so abyssal they threaten a listener’s intestinal integrity. In that same sewer pipe the guitars create a dense frothing mass of toxic sonic effluent, roiling and writhing as if indeed being whipped into a vortex of ruinous infection.
But within that abusive audio vortex there’s still intrigue to be found. The multiply-layered guitars jolt, jab, and rake as well as unhealthily swirl, swivel, wail, moan, and convulse in seizures. The lead guitar fights through the morass to vent its own shrill fevers and bizarre shrieking ecstasies, and at one point a strange pinging tone emerges, as if the band decided to strike an orchestral triangle just for the hell of it.
In keeping with these experiences, the drumming is obliterating but creates its own intrigue as the patterns change constantly and without warning — maniacally battering, methodically hammering, jumping into sprightly skipping cadences and two-step gallops, rolling like thunder, and eventually joining with the rest of the band near the end in a breakdown that inflicts hulking, neck-wrecking, pile-driving brutishness.
Even the vocals, which mostly take the form of fanatically imperious growls and grating bellows, effectively lose their mind too.
We urge you also to treat yourself to the album’s first single, “Abysmal Resurrection“, which comes in at a minute longer than today’s song premiere. It’s just as much of a violent and diseased sonic vortex as the song we’ve just presented, but even more varied in its sudden tempo changes, more dismal and hopeless in its morphing moods (thanks in part to wailing melodies that fluidly flow through, and high above, the lower-end punishment), and perhaps even more grisly in the impact of its tremolo’d riffing.
Blood Harvest Records will release Vortex Oblivion on CD, vinyl LP, and cassette formats, as well as digitally. Pre-orders are available now:
PRE-ORDER:
https://shop.bloodharvest.se/?s=desekryptor&post_type=product
https://bloodharvestrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vortex-oblivion
DESEKRYPTOR:
https://www.facebook.com/desekryptor