Growing Seeds of Decay

I really want to like this album more than I do- most people in my corner of the brutal death scene are really big fans of it, and I can see why, but it just doesn't grip me like it should. Septycal Gorge is basically a 50/50 mixture of early Fleshgrind and Insidious Decrepancy, making for very mechanical, technical brutal death metal built on long, machinelike blast beats and atonal, spiraling riffs, which is something I'm all for- it's a style that's mostly ignored in brutal death these days. Still, there's a few things which torpedo this album for me and just leave it a fairly lackluster part of my collection.

Okay, so this is pretty sterile music; everything is click tracked to death and the drums might as well be programmed, they're so inhumanly played. This really extends to the guitars as well, mostly to do with the riffs they choose: everything's a very straightforward rhythmic pattern, and the usage of palm-muted tremolo riffs to build tension is an obvious nod to Insidious Decrepancy. Occasionally they'll snap into something kind of like a slam, but this is music really all about the tremolo riffs, and there's a ton of them, all uniformly atonal like modern Cannibal Corpse minus the thrash, but with a touch of what sounds like '50s sci-fi film melody- you know, the sort of thing you'd hear played on an organ when the giant spiders come over the hill. It's a cool idea in theory and I won't even say the execution is necessarily flawed.

There are definite problems with this, though. For one, it seems extremely repetitive; the sheer lack of variation in rhythm or tempo makes just about every song sound the same. Moreover, the level of chromatic similarity between the riffs (and the songs as a whole) makes them almost indistinguishable sometimes. Any given song on this album doesn't really have as many riffs as it wants to convince you of, and they have a bad tendency to run every riff into the ground for way longer than they entirely should. I think part of the problem with this record is also the production: it's extremely dry. I mean, the drums don't sound like they have hint of reverb on them, which makes this kind of an ear-straining record; everything's all compressed into a very narrow midrange, so it ends up sounding very tiny and not particularly heavy. Exactly the sort of thing you don't want from a brutal death record.

This isn't an awful record, but it is extremely repetitive, and frankly this particular style of riffing (and maybe brutal death as a whole) is starting to wear on me. I could probably see listening to this if it got remixed and remastered with a more well-rounded production job, or if they reworked some of the tracks to be a little less sheerly repetitive, but as it stands I just don't have a lot of reasons to listen to this.

My conception of this album changed over time. I always give myself time to write these reviews, because my full sense of the album does not develop until I have listened to it like 3-4 times, and with some albums it changes as time progresses. This album totally blew me away at first. This band is basically like the Italian version of Beheaded. Similar style, similar importance on riffing and on making riffs stick and be unique. They achieve this with less success then their Maltese counterparts, but they still managed to release an excellent, above average death metal album, with some technical elements.

The music is less complex then Beheaded, and less dense too. It is easily understood comparatively, but it is still very technical, and the riffs change pretty frequently. There are a lot of non-stop blasting and stop and go passages, like Deeds Of Flesh, Pyaemia, etc, but with great catchy riffs. There are some fillers however, and that makes this bad. Those songs whose names you do not remember, who just roll on by and let you catch your breath, get a snack, etc. They have managed to sneak on to this otherwise awesome sounding and awesome riff laden album. Which is just a shame, I would have liked it better if the album was shorter but better, but even like this it is worth a listen. The best songs on here are ‘Abominated Hierarchy’, ‘Poisoned Human Flesh’ and ‘Infected Dreams’. They do quiet a bit of experimenting with their sound on that last one, ‘Infected Dreams’ and it is absolutely brilliant. The good songs on this are so fucking good that they make the wait worth your while, but why would you have to wait?