...and Time Begins

Yeah cool, chaos and speed with verified finger artistics and deep throat action on top. A lot of porn videos are also advertised like that, so what's not to like? Apparently, quite a lot. Decrepid Birth started their journey(?) with a really classic but still kinda fresh and exciting, atmospheric cover artwork, one incredibly tight high speed drummer that must have been part woodpecker and part laser cyborg battle warlord, some equally fast guitarists with six fingers on each hand and a lot of fan passion for the heart of pure distilled death metal that is upsetting mothers and priests successfuly since 1989. But oh my god what the shit, this album is dull.

As if Decrepid Birth subconsciously knew about their weakness, they pushed the impressive bunny-on-cocaine-hump-snare too much to the front during the mixing to let it steal the show intentionally. "We know y'all kinda heard it all before but look at that loud snare go TATATATATATATA! Ain't that awesome?" Abhorrence used the same trick and it did not help them either. Good lord, the riffs behind that diversion are boring. They are fast for the sake of pure speed and chaotic for the sake of confusion but they are not fast and chaotic to help realize any kind of artistic vision. They are bragging with all the hours that have been spent with guitar lessons and training sessions but they do not really talk to you and that is actually making me sad.

Crimson Carnage or Amputated Genitals for example use the same technique of pummeling riff attacks until you start bleeding from your asshole and your brain sues for mercy but they never forget that even death metal fans want to be entertained or stimulated on some abstract level. This album is imitating the greats of the genre and even surpassing some of them in terms of tornado destruction. But it's not helping with the show at all. Decrepid Birth play brutal and technical death metal without playing really technical or brutal music, sometimes I actually doubt that they enjoyed playing and hearing their own melodies. This album is not a nihilistic, bare naked comment about the emptiness of life in the vein of Enmity, this is competently played but ultimately just really irrelevant music.

I have never encountered a death metal album like this, it felt like everyone is posing with numbing sweeps of worthless note combinations to impress people that are actually impressed by the cold image and not the warm heart of technical and brutal death metal. It's all a quote, a mask, a scam, a weak show. Ultimately, there is nothing there. A truly vacuous album. Oh yeah, I should probably say something about the vocals. They are that much mediocre and unimpressive that I almost forgot that they exist in the first place.

It is somewhat of an anomaly in death metal that a great band starts their career with a mediocre debut. More often than not, it's the debut of many a death metal ensemble the one considered their masterpiece, and so many bands have failed to replicate the grandeur of that first outburst (Morbid Angel being the apex example in my list). But, to quote Col. Hans Landa, “in the pages of history, every once in a while, fate reaches out and… punctures your eardrums with an obsidian-made Cthulhu-shaped dildo”… or, something like that. So here it is, nowadays usually revered tech death outfit Decrepit Birth's first record, one of the few examples I can think about that are the exception rather than the rule. At first glance, one would think this wouldn't be as different from the rest of their discography. Just look at that cover artwork by the master himself! Pure Dan Seagrave badassery! How can something so visually tasty conceal such a boring musical work? Perhaps this is the worse album ever graced by an original Seagrave. Nonetheless, I'm thankful that the band kept on using the masterful veteran for their ensuing releases.

…and Time Begins arrived at a point in death metal's history in which tech death was not as abundant and commonplace as it is nowadays. The early 2000s where characterized by a handful of bands dominating the niche; Decapitation, Nile, Origin, Necrophagist, Spawn of Possession, Arsis and a few others, each with their own personality and unique traits, all traversing the path razed before them by mighty Suffocation. Therefore, the land was ripe with the smell of death for this Californians to carve their place among the elite. The dexterity and potency was there; inhumanly swift hands and limbs of all members to produce blindingly fast and brutal death metal, and über-low growls with enough personality by Bill Robinson. However, as it sometimes happens with a band loaded with talent and virtuosity, this last quality becomes the element that dictates and controls the musicians, and not the other way around. What's more important, all that virtuosity translates to virtually no moments of memorability and is only vent on producing a linear, uneventful, mindless and endless pummeling that would make AC/DC horrified at the monotony.

Brutal death metal fans sometimes confuse brutality with an infinity grey barrage of warp speed tremolo riffs and blasting, but I have to disagree. This album is boring, however impressive their creators. I'm positive Tim Yeung has the ability to play faster drums totally submerged in a tar pit than most drummers can in a regular studio room with normal gravity and clean air, but his drumming here is totally dull and predictable. So are Matt Sotelo's guitars, whereas awesome bass-beast Derek Boyer is barely audible. The mix is also flawed, pretty compressed, giving Tim's bass drums a particularly distasteful thin clicking sound. Bill Robinson is the most impressive and incumbent performer of the four, and remains one of the few elements here that would make me want to listen to this… had Decrepit Birth not released anything else in their existence.

It's extremely difficult for me to pick any standout tracks here, not because they kick ass, but because all the compositions blend into one another like a gigantic brutal death metal epic with half and hour duration. I'm glad it isn't longer, and that concept actually seems interesting, but not with these unexciting short songs. The two-minute instrumental “Of Genocide”, a mid-tempo crushing interlude, is actually the only one I think I’ll pick, but only because it provides a respite of sorts from the non-stop percussive mass, just like the ambient second half of the nine-minute title track, which sadly arrives too late into the disc, and is too damn long, ironically. It might have taken them five years in the making, but sophomore Diminishing Between Worlds was totally worth its time and an incredible surprise, the band's change in direction a spectacular one, soon to be amplified by the incoming Axis Mundi, one of the most anticipated albums of the year in my list. Waste no time in listening to this and start with the other releases by this great band.

There never has been such a waste of talent as on the debut of California death metal act Decrepit Birth. Recorded as a trio at the band’s home studio in Santa Cruz and including studio drumming by the noted Tim Yeung (who cut his teeth with studio work for Hate Eternal and Aurora Borealis) “…And Time Begins” merely scratched the surface of what founder/guitarist Matt Sotelo would later present. Bill Robinson is an unremarkable vocalist in every meaning of the word, and a record as redundant as “…And Time Begins” does not help his case at all. The performance of bass guitarist Derek Boyer on this record would be instrumental in him being hired by reformed New York death metal stalwarts Suffocation. While far from terrible, the first Decrepit Birth record is one of squandered opportunities, and a waste of the talented cast involved in its creation. This record should have been much better than it is. This shouldn’t have been another soulless and unnecessary Deeds Of Flesh knockoff. Sadly, it is just that and nothing more.

It’s hard to tell any of these songs apart, except for signature song ‘Shroud Of Impurity’ which either sounds like “Inbreeding the Anthropophagi” Deeds Of Flesh or “Conquering the Throne” Hate Eternal at various points. ‘Concepting the Era’ sounds slightly more diverse in terms of pacing and structure compared to the rest of the songs. That the band refuses to play any leads/solos is, of course, detrimental to these songs as they would have been much more easily to recollect with an identifier, or two. One but last track ‘Of Genocide’ is different from the rest of the album. It is much slower and sounds a lot like “Blessed Are the Sick” Morbid Angel instead of the rampant Suffocation and Deeds Of Flesh worship on display on the remainder of the album. The similarities with Deeds Of Flesh track ‘A Violent God’ are readily apparent. This is about any and all subtlety you’ll encounter on this particular outing. The title track is a 9 minute exercise that is far better and more ambitious than a good number of these other songs combined. Why the rest of the album wasn’t written in this manner is a question for the ages. For the most part in its quest for brutality Decrepit Birth forgot to write songs.

Bill Robinson tries his best to sound like Disgorge vocalist Matti Way. There are a couple of instances where his grunts are overlaid with screams, but its usage isn’t as prominent with this band as with Deeds Of Flesh (a band that lifted that aspect themselves from Deicide). Thankfully, Robinson enunciates far better than the eternally indecipherable Way. In terms of power Robinson is similar to Fleshgrind frontman Rich Lipscomb. The bass guitar can thankfully be heard on “…And Time Begins” with Derek Boyer providing some fine licks to go with the limited material. There are bass breaks in ‘Prelude To the Apocalypse’ and ‘Condemned to Nothingness’, but their appearance is too brief to be of any real merit. While the bass guitar itself is thick and oozing its clinical modern production eschews the instrument’s bottom end heaviness for a lighter tone. Perhaps the band would have benefited from a heavier tone similar to Cannibal Corpse fixture Alex Webster, or even Jan-Chris de Koeijer’s concrete tone on Gorefest’s third album “Erase”.

At least Decrepit Birth, or main composer Matt Sotelo, was wise enough to go for somewhat interesting lyrics. Avoiding the usual and tired subject matter such as horror, blasphemy and gore, the band adopted a broad science-fiction concept about the universe, astral phenomena and the conception of time and mankind. The lyrics are actually quite refined, and reminiscent of early Suffocation. The album is important in that after its release in 2003 suddenly death metal bands all over California (and the US as a whole) who had previously sung about horror, perversion and gore started adopting science fiction lyrics, and adapting themselves accordingly. The concept would be explored in greater detail on the band’s second album “Diminishing Between Worlds” but at least some degree of thought and consideration was put into them. Unfortunately do the somewhat interesting lyrics not compensate for the redundancy of the music present on the disc. One is hardpressed to call these sci-fi lyrics original, as Nocturnus and Demilich were already doing such a thing in the early 90s. In 2003 there were better releases to procure, such as Mithras’ “Worlds Beyond the Veil”, Diabolic’s “Infinity Through Purification” or Nile’s “In Their Darkened Shrines” that arrived the year before.

As everybody was using digital art Decrepit Birth made a wise choice in commissioning the Dan Seagrave art that adorns the record. This in turn led to renewed interest in his repertoire as a classic death metal artist. The album was mixed and mastered at Imperial Mastering by Colin Davis (of the band Vile). On the whole “…And Time Begins” is a competent death metal album that gets by on the grace of its unrepentant brutality, which is a detriment for the exact same reason. This was a mere lovenote to Decrepit Birth’s inspirations, and not a true display of their musicality and skill. The fact is that the band plays far below its skill level on this album. The fact that it’s so painfully average and unremarkable makes one question how the band ever got as far as they did. “…And Time Begins” is a typical early 2000s Unique Leader Records release, meaning that it was competent in what it intended to do, but lacked that spark to set it apart from the hundreds of other bands attempting a similar thing the world over. It’s only the Dan Seagrave art that truly set its apart from the Jon Zig fronted releases of the day. In all “…And Time Begins” is a good record in spirit, but not one to go down in the annals of extreme metal history as mandatory or vital. It is an album marked by a dire waste of talent and squandered opportunities. Decrepit Birth was to reveal its renewed sense of purpose and direction only half a decade later with their much better second album.

Review originally written for Least Worst Option - www.leastworstoption.com

No pauses, no soothing acoustic guitar pieces of chiaroscuro building, no female vocal soaring and dipping, no synthesizer soundscapes to set the mood, no gradual development and stately, slow introduction. No excuses. Just sheer sudden terror, in medias res, like waking up from a deep dreamless sleep to a raging anxiety attack in your intestines, the fluids hammering in your head, finding yourself struggling to catch a breath and hearing a tornado roaring outside your window, the glass buckling and bending inward, trees crashing and falling to the scorched ground, and then greeted with the view of every member of your family, young and old, crazed, possessed, at each other's throats, screaming and ripping and tearing. Ex Inferis. This is how this album begins, and does not let up one single time, one single second for twenty five-odd minutes. The song lengths tell the tale: 1:24, 3:02, 2:58, 2:14, 2:14, 3:29, 3:31, 2:12, and 4:04 [an epic by this album's standards, leading into a long outro that takes up the remaining 5:00]. No wasted, excess flesh, no fat to trim, no empty calories. Twenty five minutes of pure unadulterated brutal technical grinding death metal, the way it was meant to be played, and in a way that it has never been played before.

People have been referencing Deeds of Flesh when referring to this band. I think Deeds of Flesh hears music like this in their nightmares.

Decrepit Birth are technically proficient. This fact will burst in upon your senses in the first 1:24, the opening fusillade "Prelude to the Apocalypse", which is a seething, chaotic full body epileptic seizure of hammering blasts and absurdly pure labyrinth-riffing. Vocalist Bill Robinson groans and spits into the microphone: "Before time it existed a life barren rock/Orbiting perpetually the sphere of light/Incubating life upon the jewel of/Omni-po-tence". The next line, in the lyric sheet as "Harmony [balanced with/with chaos]" is not heard so much as it is felt clotting in one's bowels. The second verse, "Instinctual process/Learning continuous/Calling upon effort to survive as a whole" is absorbed so fast that it doesn't even register. You are already lost. The song is approaching its tortured adolescence, one fourth of its running time, and it is leaving you behind. The drastic formula is set: from Tim Yeung, blistering, Gatling gun snare hits, constant, rolling double bass, lightspeed swirling fills, a storm of clashing cymbals; then palm-muted percussive riffing in white noise avalanches of bewildering melodic fragments, isolated riffs, and riff segments that blow past your ears so quickly you spend half of the listening time trying to remember what you just heard. A deep, persuasive vocal presence appears, front and center, a voice both world weary and confidently aggressive. Bass lines stretch across the inner landscape, appearing mainly as cast-off aftereffects of Derek Boyer's fingers hitting his strings, mirroring Matt Sotelo's world-building guitar. I usually don't pick up consciousness again until the finale of the third song, where Robinson echoes at its climax "I am your Kingdom of God, I am your Kingdom of God, I am your Kingdom of God, I am your Kingdom of God." It actually sounds like he's saying "I became a God." Amazing.

Through music... I became a God.

Decrepit Birth [what a strange name!] are at the top of the technical/brutal death metal genre. There is not another band on this planet that is as frustratingly technical and incredibly harsh and/or hard in its effects. They are simply merciless and their adroit instrumental proficiency seems to appear as just another form of cruelty, creating maze after dark maze which ensnares one's will as one is dragged bodily, screaming, through the dissecting process of each song. If I could compare this band to any object or entity it would be some kind of reaping or slaughtering machine, like those dismembering engines on the cover of Suffocation's "Effigy of the Forgotten", only this machine not only rips and tears you to shreds, it somehow devours you whole and deposits each particle of your eviscerated corpse inside tiny mirrored compartments where your consciousness is divided and yet still solvent, trapped within a thousand individual abysses. Dead and dreaming in blood, you stare at your minutely discomposed self for eternity. I love this band, and yet I hate how they often make me feel: old, slow, confused, lost, and ultimately meaningless. Full of... despair. Isolated, alienated, victimized. Inhuman.

Isn't this how death metal is supposed to make you feel?

I think it is impossible for me to adequately describe this work, or to echo in words the effect it has on one when one listens to it. After all, if I could completely capture the impact of this music in language [if anyone could] there wouldn't be any reason for it to exist. Decrepit Birth are constantly seeking to go beyond language, even beyond the musical language and system of signs/symbols that death metal has created over the past decade to express and/or capture the kinds of emotions that they are putting forth here. Ultimately the best seducer and convincer is just the music itself, without excuses [as I said above], without introductions or appeasements or attempts at placing this monster of an album within descriptive brackets, labels, or judgements. I have been listening to this thing for more than a month now and I am still as bewildered as I was on the first day I heard it, although I can pick up signposts for my own orientation every now and again as it whirls me through its cyclone transgressions. Is this the future of death metal? I don't know... it is one possible future, of course. Decrepit Birth, with the writing and selling of this music, would seem to want other bands to follow in their footsteps and take up their banner, their crusade to warp, alter, and revivify the strangled creativity in death metal. The only problem is that... I don't know of any bands that could actually follow in their wake, such is the path of destruction this monument leaves behind it.

UA

Erebus Magazine
http://erebuszine.blogspot.com

Like a number of their other Californian peers, my investment in the music of Decrepit Birth has directly correlated to their inclination with their movements towards further musicality. In retrospect, they've grown into quite a fascinating, progressive death metal powerhouse with a solid grasp of melody and contrast, but turn back the clock about a decade, and you've got a pretty average brutal death metal act that struggled to distinguish itself from numerous others. I remember a bit of buzz over ...And Time Begins, but I feel like people are often too forgiving or have pretty low standards when it comes to this niche. For me, it's not simply about sick drumming and gorgeous, gruesome, cover art (both of which this debut clearly possesses). One of my criteria for brutal/technical death is the following: if I can listen to a single track at random from your album, and receive just about everything I need to know, all of its potential emotional impact; and then subsequently confirm this with numerous runs through the entirety of the play length, then there is something seriously lacking...

A criteria from which, unfortunately, the Decrepit Birth debut failed to redeem itself. The inaugural battering of the Californians was essentially a Suffocation clone with a few Cannibal Corpse-inspired riff structures. Also with a strong hint of their fellow statesmen and label mates Deeds of Flesh, not only during the faster, percussive spurts of muted guitars, but also the very design of their logo. ...And Time Begins is brutal to a fault, and it's performed with no dearth of competence or dexterity, but the fact is I can select about 2-3 minutes of material here and have heard all I really care to know. The music falls short of evoking any sort of true menace or evil atmosphere, it's merely jocked up on steroids and attempts to steamroll its listenership into stunned submission, only it doesn't have the riffing strength to do so. It entirely wastes its meticulous and clinical nature on boring rhythm guitar progressions that lack depth and variation. On a strictly rhythmic level, there were some flighty and bombastic passages scattered throughout the 30 minutes which, under a better choice of notation, might have shined, but they're thrown away on predictable and uninteresting streams of palm mutes that don't show a lot of effort beyond their sheer acrobatics.

They try to vary it up occasionally, like the roiling, dissonant grooves that open "Of Genocide" which feel like a mix of Consuming Impulse Pestilence and Bloodthirst era Cannibal Corpse, but those don't seem to pay off either. The vocals are a genre standard, blunt guttural with a little growled out sustain, once in a while flirting with a toilet bowl tone; perfectly suitable for the style, and never really the forte of Decrepit Birth even on their ensuing, compelling efforts, but yet another element that fails to evoke any sort of menace. I mean, let's lay it on the line: when I see a horrific, enthralling cyclone of lost souls or demons against an alien, harrowing landscape of cyclopean, Lovecraftian proportions, I want the music it represents to scare the living shit out of me. I want to be afraid. I'm PAYING to be afraid. But the constant, spurious concussions being wrought with the guitars, vocals and drums feel like little more than an exercise. Like the soundtrack to a crowd of neanderthals grunting and wagering the bones of their latest kills over a chicken fight. Or death eagles, or whatever the shit they used back in those times when they crawled out of their caves for a social.

Me Oog! Me crush you! Imagine that if it were repeated about a million times, accelerated and decelerated and then layered across numerous tracks and tempos, and you've got a fair approximation of the range of these concise tunes. That'd actually be fine if there was a riff or two worth a damn in each. Not gonna happen here! Tim Yeung turns in his usual, mercenary brand of annihilation, but he's almost overworking himself, because he's not used to support anything worthwhile. The production of the guitars and drums is decent, a slightly more iron clad approximation of the Deeds of Flesh records of this time, but I felt like the bass playing was largely lost in the shuffle. The chugging simply crushes it to a single flat dimension. Lyrics, which eschew the stereotypical gore for more cosmic and nihilistic themes, are honestly the best part of ...And Time Begins (aside from Dan Seagrave's artwork), but they too are suffocated by the bludgeoning, bland songwriting. As I was revisiting this, I kept thinking to myself: put something here! A lead! A sample! A keyboard! A melody! A REAL RIFF. Decrepit Birth would not oblige me here, and though it's hard to be peeved in retrospect, since they too were aware of such limitations and evolved significantly, I'll oblige in return by putting any thoughts of this debut to rest.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Well holy fucking shit, even though you can hear the Immolation, Suffocation, and other New York death metal influences well, this band manages to make it sound fresh, and so relentlessly brutal. The vocals here are demonic and low in the sense of Immolation, the drumming here is absolutely outstanding, as it balances its insanely fast blasting and double bass passages with these amazing fills. The guitar riffing is just, alienish, atonal, in the sense of Suffocation's "Pierced From Within" but morphed it with "Despise the Sun" in its intensity.

Even though these songs aren't the most memorable songs in death metal ever, they manage to keep you wanting even more, discovering even more riffs, fills, etc. in the sense of Gorguts' "Obscura" or Suffocation's "Pierced From Within". When you first listen to this, it grabs you by the balls and never fucking lets go. The production here is also fucking sharp and loud, like Deicide's "Legion" with the exception of the bass, you can still hear it but not as loud. The combined production and the performance makes this as brutal as fuck, and not how everyone uses it for every so called "brutal" death metal band.

The artwork here is also great here too, total chaos, which sums the album up well. This album was a great suprise in a genre filled with a monotone sound which gets boring after a while, and the gore themes are not here, instead using more abstract thems, but make them sound chaotic. I highly recommend this to someone who doesn't know what "brutal" REALLY means. This album pretty much conveys an atmosphere presented by "Pierced From Within", hell, it sounds like "Pierced From Within" on steroids.

...And Time begins may not be a "classic, landmark metal album" but it absolutely has some of the most brutal and technical chops this genre has seen. The one thing that appeals to me the most about this album is its extreme consistency. There may not be memorable parts from track to track but the album as a whole has a very consistent sound. However, this may be a turn off to some who want progression and differentiation within an album.

The vocals are very deep and guttural, only adding to the very heavy sound. The drums, though slightly over-triggered, are dead on almost the entire album. Tim Yeung adds enough variations in the blastbeats to keep the music interesting and adds some interesting fills to break up the parts. Guitars are pretty typical for this style, with the bass guitar peaking out every once in a while with an interesting riff.

One other thing I found interesting was the theme of this album. Certainly the cover art explains the mood quite well; there is a definite futuristic/fantasy theme. The title track ends the album with several minutes of spacey, futuristic noise, sounding like some crazy robot battle in the distant future.

While the technicality may not be comparable to the mind-boggling time signatures of Necrophagist and the like, each section of each song is structured in a unique way, creating a technical yet very heavy atmosphere. This album is solid and worth checking out.

I liked this album quite a bit the very first time I heard it, but I'd have been hard-pressed to describe exactly why, since there's not a whole lot about it that obviously sticks out from other technical brutal death metal bands at first glance.

Detractors of the band don't like what they hear on first listen, and they're quick to decide that there isn't anything that sticks out about them after all, and that they're just one more in an army of similar bands. If that were really true, though, either I'd like Decrepit Birth a lot less, or I'd like the current state of death metal a whole lot more. In fact they're one of the very few brutal death metal bands I particularly like, and I like them quite a bit.

The official band biography might offer a little insight: "Decrepit Birth is a modern style death metal band, building upon the blocks of the early 90's death metal scene," it says.

I think it's that direct influence from classic death metal that makes the difference. Modern death metal has mostly wandered off on its own tangent of pure rhythm and weird chords and jazz and core and... whatever, but behind all the pyrotechnics Decrepit Birth still more or less resemble a classic-style American death metal band (Suffocation, Deicide, or Death maybe), and aim to convey that same kind of dark atmosphere.

Bear in mind, that's behind a lot of pyrotechnics. Suffocation focused a lot on playing variations of riffs instead of just repeating exactly the same thing over and over, and this album carries that idea out about as far as it can go, to the point where there's almost no repetition at all, and nearly every riff is a slight variation of the one that came before, and the riffs are very technical, and it's really fast on top of all that. It's not true that the music is completely chaotic, though: the fact that music mostly sticks with slight variations instead of violent transitions is the glue that keeps it together. In fact, the song "Rebirth of Consciousness" pretty much is total chaos, a fact that tends to stick out after a few dozen listens, and it suffers for it. Skeptics might give the semi-instrumental song "Of Genocide" a spin, as it's a bit slower than most of the rest of the album and thus a little easier to follow, though it's structured similarly to the other songs.

Even speaking as a fan, I have to admit that this isn't the sort of thing that I would want to listen to all the time, and it's pretty hard to get into. The music is so lopsidedly fixated on speed and complexity that it almost paints itself into a corner. Even the band might agree; they have the following to say about the next album:

"This album will be a step in more of a melodic and progressive direction yet still have a heavy dose of technical brutality. Very reminiscent of bands such as later Death, Cynic and Quo Vadis mixed with the brutality that Decrepit Birth is known for."

I'm not much into later Death, Cynic, or Quo Vadis, but the promo tracks at least sound interesting. A bit of normal melody might suit the band. At the very least I hope it finds them a more receptive audience. Those of you who can appreciate "...And Time Begins" for what it is, though, may find it a rewarding listen. It's well-crafted and serious, which distinguishes from the crowd more than a cheap gimmick would.

I've never quite understood why everyone interpreted 'Souls To Deny' as Suffocation's triumphant return to the metal scene. Sure, it was an excellent album, but everyone seems to be willfully ignoring '...And Time Begins' from just a year before! I'm not sure what causes such an oversight in what appears to be the entire metal community, but I've decided to take the time to shed light on this little-discussed entry in Suffocation's lengthy catalog.

Well, I guess one of the reasons is that it's just not that good an album. Suffocation's trademark has always been in their unique variety of pummeling yet obfuscatingly technical brand of death metal. And certainly, this album has all of Suffocation's trademark sounds: it's just as brutal and technical as it's always been. However, unlike previous albums where Suffocation showed a genuine change and development from release to release, '...And Time Begins' doesn't really go much of anywhere. Sure, it certainly sounds more modern, resembling the newer style of grindcore-influenced brutal death that was popularized at the turn of the millennium, but the music itself seems to go nowhere that has not been tread before by Suffocation or other bands.

Not to say that '...And Time Begins' is an utter loss. Certainly, it packs more technicality and brutality into it's half-hour running time than previous Suffocation releases. All the instruments are played viciously quickly and precise, and there are plenty of Suffocation's classic breakdowns to go around. However, the simple fact is that there just isn't that much development present on the album. If purchased by metalheads who are not that familiar with their previous works, I'm sure '...And Time Begins' would be greeted with great enthusiasm. However, metalheads who don't know Suffocation like the back of their hand are a rare breed indeed, making this album somewhat difficult to recommend. Certainly, fans of brutal, technical death metal will enjoy it, but I don't know how much they'll appreciate the rehashing of old elements.

'...And Time Begins' is not a bad album. It is simply highly, highly derivative brutal death metal that the vast majority of us have heard time and time again. For the brutal death metal fan, this is not at all a terrible purchase. But there is little to motivate a fan outside the style to make the purchase.

(Originally written for http://www.grindingtheapparatus.net)

Decrepit Birth's only album (so far) is one huge slab of brutal death metal. The sound production of this album is perfect. It's a quality recording. It is something worth listening to if you're a brutal death metalhead.

The vocals are pretty brutal and harsh. On all of the songs (except for Of Genocide, that's an instrumental), Matt Sotelo and Bill Robinson sound like they wants to kill someone. The guitar work from Matt is pretty good on all of the songs. I was surprised to read that he was the only guitarist on this album. Yes, I can also say the bass work is good, because I can definitely hear it on this album. I was really disappointed to read that Derek Boyer left the band. I like his bass playing.

The one thing I'm really impressed with is the drum work. It's not a drum machine at all. Too bad the Tim Yeung is not with them anymore. He was one heck of a drummer. He had a lot of skills when he was with Decrepit Birth and he showcased them quite well on ...And Time Begins.

I can't until the new album is released, because the next one will have two guitarists on it. It will be interesting to listen to Decrepit Birth with two guitarists. Since I can't get enough of ...And Time Begins, I'm looking forward to their next effort.

Brutal death metal is a very often mentioned genre nowadays. But lots of band tend to simply plagiarise each other. And Decrepit Birth are a perfect example.
You got a really good packaging. The cover is pure art. Also the lyrics are very interesting, because they are not the gorecore thing that brutal death uses. In fact, they are great, dealing with the Cosmos, infinity, and abstract concepts.
But fuck it, I don't listen to the cover. And I don't listen only to lyrics. So the music appears to me as total crappy set of uninspired, boring music. And it isn't original. In fact, this piece of tech scum did nothing but borrow elements from Suffocation, Dying Fetus and Deeds of Flesh. And it borrowed the worst elements. There are absolutely no tracks to raise above the others. Riffs are getting fucking similar, the drumming is linear and no exception from the brOOtal pile. A guttural growl serves for the "vokills", which are no news from the death metal front.
Let's say that on this disc four bands are struggling: Suffocation, Deeds of Flesh, Dying Fetus, and the weakest, tiniest of all, Decrepit Birth. Decrepit Birth got this enormous percentage only for the cover and the lyrics. And if we talk about the music itself, Suffocation, Fetus and Deeds have 100%, all of them. Leaving a big steaming 0% to the Decrepits.
Don't say you have not been warned: buy this only for the cover, or if you like those Suffo-clones that rise like mushrooms after the rain.
The others, avoid this sad monument of imitation and boredom.