(written by Islander)
We’re about to present a song that should make even the most hardened and hard-to-please death metal fans sit up and pay close attention. It’s a track called “Horde d’invertébrés” off the debut album Simulacre from Quebec’s Décryptal, which will be co-released on July 11th by Me Saco Un Ojo and Rotted Life.
In the space of just this one song Décryptal lead listeners through a musical house of horrors, pulling us forward from one ghastly room to the next, with enough return trips among them to embed their hideous visions in a listener’s head (and providing a time to bang our heads as well).
Or, to put it differently, Décryptal have lodged “Horde d’invertébrés” with a cornucopia of creepy, cadaverous, and carnivorous riffs, frequently altered tempos, mutating bass lines, varying drum rhythms, and monstrous roaring and screaming vocals that seem to be vibrating off the fractured walls of a dank crypt.
Décryptal welcome us into their horrid musical mansion with an eerily quivering ambient melody and a murmuring bass that seems to be smiling in anticipation of what we’re about to witness. The guitars pick up the melody and carry it forward as the drums come in, and in their hands the melody sounds even more ominous and vast, more dismal and haunting, and (thanks to the lead guitar’s shrill and feverish wailing) more dangerous to sanity.
From there, the guitars groan in agony and convulse in fear, gruesomely writhe like enormous fattened maggots and churn as if manifesting a flesh-eating disease running rampant. That shrill lead guitar also reappears, adding its demented screams to the building horrors.
Meanwhile, the drums bludgeon, batter, and boom in sudden furies, and patiently snap at our necks while the guitars engage in feeding frenzies, and the bass engages in its own mercurial maneuvers.
And then, following a bridge made with viciously squalling and jabbing fretwork, momentous drum strikes, and a pungent grunt, the band inflict an imminently headbangable guitar-and-bass riff — still gruesome and grisly but compulsively muscle-moving. In the mansion’s final room, they also engage in the song’s most jubilantly maniacal phase.
This has been a ridiculously wordy way of trying to explain that while “Horde d’invertébrés” is authentically gruesome, ossuary-spawned, and supernaturally ravenous death metal, its well-plotted variations are captivating — and its changing motifs turn out to be damned infectious too.
The music is also extremely well-produced. It’s not too shined-up, and yet you can make out the vital contributions of each Décryptal member. Listen for yourselves:
Following the links we also invite you to listen to the previously released album track “Zisurru“, which reinforces the impressions created by the track we’ve just premiered — that Décryptal have a fiendish knack for creating multi-faceted and very catchy musical horrors that are exhilarating to hear. It is true, as the labels’ PR pitch portrays, that Décryptal‘s death metal is “cavernously gruesome,” “atmospheric and yet savagely punchy,” and an “eldritch abomination of extremity,” but it also “stands out from the crowd with interesting songwriting and unique flares.”
PRE-ORDER:
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/simulacre
https://www.mesacounojo.com
https://rottedlife.bandcamp.com/album/simulacre
https://www.rottedlife.com
DÉCRYPTAL:
https://www.facebook.com/decryptal