In Torment in Hell

Upon first hearing this, I think it's one of Deicide's worst albums with the Hoffman brothers. I thought 'Insineratehymn' was pretty generic despite my high score upon a few listens to. The newer generation of Deicide is pretty bad, 'The Stench of Redemption' I marked pretty poorly but in retrospect that was a decent album with Ralph Santolla (RIP) and Jack Owen. But 'In Torment In Hell' I still like, I just think it's really sloppy and uncreative. They kind of pulled a 'Serpents of the Light' intro with the title-track but it's just turned into their own riff. They're pretty careless on here and left their creative juices behind.

I like the intro, but overall the music just sucks. They didn't offer much in airing 31 minutes of shit metal. I'm not sure if they had their contract up with Roadrunner or what. A totally thoughtless release which had many fans (including me) disappointed. How can they take a break and make up for this. With 'Scars of the Crucifix'? I don't know, maybe. But the Hoffman brothers legacy is over onto the next generation (which it has been) of Deicide. I'll always appreciate the first 4 releases from this band. But talk about getting lazy! That's exactly what they did here and their previous (as I noted).

Nothing on here is worth getting excited over. You would think a band would progress over the years and not the reverse of that. But they just show you that they just suck on this album. It doesn't matter what track you pick, they're all equally worthless. I actually went ahead and ordered this on eBay hoping that some day I'll appreciate this album. Listening to it on headphones has me keyed into all the flaws with it that I don't want to do. They used to be an inspiring death metal band with riffs that were supercharged and creative. I guess that they just didn't want to continue their career making quality material.

I heard this on Spotify with disbelief. What happened!! This average score was 33% and hell my score is right about there too! I wouldn't say to buy this even if you are a Deicide fan. I did, but with much reluctance. Putrid as hell, what a major dud! There's nothing on here worth mentioned maybe check out the title-track, "Vengeance is Mine" and "Christ Don't Care." Then you'll get an idea of what to expect. They're still death metal, just at their worst. I don't want to turn you off from being a fan of the band it's just that when music sucks, something has to be said why or what happened that made it that way. Beware!

The early 2000s was a time where metal was overrun with JNCO jean-wearing, spiky hair styling, entirely-too-reliant-on-the-word-"fuck"-saying doofy fools whose music would somehow become more dated and passé than the poofiest drippy dick glam bands of the 80s. Luckily for the world of death metal, Deicide never sank to depths that low, but refusing to hop on trends never stopped them from making shitty albums, now did it? The mainstream music industry's brief fascination with death metal having ended some time prior, Roadrunner Records, one of the labels primarily responsible for this boom period, was switching gears away from extreme music in a manner most becoming of a professional, well-to-do outfit: By refusing to promote any of their death metal bands and causing all of them to get the fuck out of dodge sooner rather than later. It's often a case in a band's history where in order to get out of a record contract, they'll intentionally phone in a final recording just to be able to finish up the deal and split. Sometimes, the band's intentions are accidentally subverted, and the record in question is a masterpiece that is much beloved by the fanbase at large (see: Vempire by Cradle of Filth). Not the case with In Torment in Hell, an album that was designed solely to be able to say "So long, and thanks for all beer" to the label that decided that Nickelback was a worthwhile endeavor, and one that's every bit as bad as the band wanted it to be.

Now, the fact that Deicide intentionally made an album they considered to be bad does not really mean that much, as they were already in a musical slump to begin with. The band had already put out one uninspired slog in Insineratehymn the year prior, and would make another one in Scars of the Crucifix three years later. It's just that In Torment in Hell is the ur-example of this downward shift in quality for the band, a disappointing one considering how phenomenally great their first four records had been. Maybe this record is more of a chore to sit through because of that ill-intention on the part of the band, but this album would have been able to put Edward Norton to sleep in Fight Club. At least Insineratehymn made an attempt to freshen up their sound by building around slower tempos and groovier riffs. I mean, it didn't work, but A for effort? This whole thing sounds like if you loaded that record up on Youtube and set the player speed to x.25. It's a death metal record being heard in slow motion, and it renders already drudging bores like the title track and "Worry in the House of Thieves" to previously unthinkable level of monotony. Everything just sludges along at a snail's pace, the urgency of the product having been left to the wolves. The riffs themselves are bog standard at absolute best, all of them being the same sort of high string tremolo picking and chunky chugging heard on the earlier, better albums, with none of the inventive catchiness Deicide had previously peppered their music with to be found. Everyone on this record just sounds totally done and over with it, and it shines through in almost every second of runtime. When a sub-3 minute tune like "Christ Don't Care" feels like you're watching some overlong Lars von Trier theatrical snoozefest*, you know something has gone terribly wrong.

Compounding all of these musical inadequacies is the quite frankly wretched production. Remember when I said that it sounds like you're listening to Deicide in slow motion? Well, I left out a crucial detail: It sounds like you're listening to Deicide in slow motion at the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool. The drums in particular have been especially neglected, lower in volume than every other element, with faint kick drums and tiny little boops for toms. The snare has that same annoying "electronic" sound that Insineratehymn's snare has, only slightly less agitating here thanks to its duller tone. The band's reasoning for the crap production quality was the label rushing them to get it out by summer's end that year, but considering that they're very obviously phoning it in on purpose (which, to repeat, is quite a feat considering they were smack dab in the middle of their dork age), I wouldn't put it past them to have not really given much of a damn in this department either. Muffled and muddied, not too dissimilar to burying your early 2000s boombox in the backyard while keeping the album on and attempting to listen to it through the ground. As if there'd be much to try and decipher in a scenario like that anyway, for barked and shrieked through the familiar throat of Glen Benton are the most generic, uninteresting lyrics he's ever penned. The well of "Jesus sucks, hail Satan" had been more than tapped by album #3, so the words he speaks are particularly dull and dreary here in the year of our Lord 2001.

Are there any parts of this album I found to be at the very least tolerable? Well, "Child of God" is totally fine for the most part. Sure, it's still a bit too slow, but it's a straightforward, if repetitious, death metal song and lacks much of the insipid grooving that permeates just about every other part of the record, so kudos for that, I guess. The cover art is also pretty much okay, albeit near the low end of Deicide album arts when compared to Once Upon the Cross or later efforts like Overtures of Blasphemy. Apparently the final art used on release was a last-minute replacement, as the original art was deemed to be too controversial to release, being a menagerie of sexual acts performed upon religious figures. The original art is floating around online, and I'm more inclined to believe that it was rejected less for its graphic depictions of religious violence and more for looking like something a 5 year old drew in kindergarten right before nap time. There's also a tiny snippet of "Vengeance Will Be Mine", the track 3 that the title of this review refers to, where you can hear Benton make noises that have been popularly described as him getting railed in the butt. Obviously, that's not how those sounds were accomplished in the studio (probably), but it's so goofy and out of place that it warrants a chuckle with each listen. Beyond that, though this is a barren wasteland where creativity goes to die, with just about no redeeming factors left to survive. Deicide wouldn't be totally out of the woods yet, as Scars of the Crucifix was to follow this mess of an album, and they'd still have at least one record afterwards that'd be not really worth taking the time to listen to in Till Death Do Us Part, but The Stench of Redemption was on the horizon, and they'd finally find their way again with In the Minds of Evil and the utterly fantastic Overtures of Blasphemy almost 20 years later, but for now, and to this day, In Torment in Hell remains the all time stinkaroo of Deicide's catalog.

*Antichrist is a pretentious pile of crap and I'm amazed that anybody thinks it's some groundbreaking horror piece. Lars von Trier sucks and he once got himself banned from Cannes for joking around that he understood Hitler.

A year after such atrocity as Insineratehymn, its dubious successor, In Torment in Hell came out, as if it wasn't bad enough. In this record however, Deicide at least added extra length to their tracks, by having at least four tracks above 4 minutes and three tracks above 3-and-a-half minutes. I asked myself how could I continue going through this record but there had to be something that's decent enough...

Vengeance Will Be Mine... a sad attempt at trying to sound catchy. The riffs were boring to hear, the drums were better than expected but not impressing. In addition to this song, you have some stupid pain-like shouting or whatever you wanna call it, which shows how careless and a comedy this album is. Imminent Death contains Metallica-like riffs. Basically, thrash metal with death growls. Another example of a song that fails to deliver when the attempt suggests some kind of groove. Child of God is also trying to sound appealing, but you know how that turned out... the chorus was nauseating with stupid guitar solos. And one final track would be Worry in the House of Thieves. It's got a cool title but doesn't correlate with the entire song. The chorus has to be the worst I've heard in death metal. Those growls...

The rest of the album is beyond forgettable; shouldn't have been written. As usual, most of the album sounds the same, in a way of wanting to sound catchy, yet miserably fails. The death growls are very frustrating to get into, the guitars are typical and much worse than the predecessor. There are very little bits in the paragraph above that may suggest some cool parts, but they don't steal the show but your time.

Let It Be Done was the only track that wasn't appalling. The music wasn't the best, but the blast beats were alright and the main guitar riff was decent. At the end of the day, the first two new millennia albums were tormenting to get through and not worth the accumulated hour of mediocrity they both possess; collectively and individually. Even at this point, Roadrunner Records kicked them out the door.

The rational minded among us might suppose that, a single year after one of your flagship death metal acts released their most mediocre effort to date, you'd want them to take to their time when next they enter the studio. If the members of Deicide are to be believed, this was not the case for In Torment In Hell, a purported rush job at the bequest of Roadrunner. Why am I not surprised? This is the same label, after all, which rose (or fell) from genuine greatness in the 80s to one of the trendiest cash whores in all the extreme music industry. The label that, two years hence, would release the worthless 'Best of' Deicide compilation to squeeze a few more bucks beyond this heap of negligible returns...

As it turns out, though, the production and the album art (which isn't frankly all that bad, merely a re-integration of past cover symbols) are not the only impediments to this wretched low. The songwriting is equally to blame, a collection of mundane and uninteresting riffs that offer nothing the band hadn't already delivered in exponentially greater quality on their formative releases Deicide (1990) and Legion (1992). In fact, the music here is so mediocre that it makes the vapid, ridiculous leads sound positively angelic by comparison, as wild and meaningless as they tend to be. In Torment In Hell is perhaps closer to the band's roots than as Insiniteratehymn, but where that album still had the capacity to bust out a half-decent guitar pattern, these are treacherously forgotten within seconds of their passing. Your typical mix of grooving chugs over double bass and explosive old school speed picking that in no way comes off effectively malevolent or even muscular (arguably the band's one strength on their better works).

The vocals might occasionally resonate along with Benton's finer performances, but their meter comes off wholly generic and derivative of the band's back catalog. I'm seriously hard pressed to think of even one riff I appreciated on the album. Even the tighter tracks like the mosh intensive "Let It Be Done" and "Imminent Doom", or the thrashing closer "Lurking Among Us" fall flat on their inverted crosses. Don't even get me started on the title track, which is perhaps the worst on the album, a poor choice for an opener. As the band would agree, the mix sounds like shit. Pick any random demo from a brutal death metal band around the turn of the century and you're likely to find better. I like the zip of the leads, but only because their frivolous tone makes them stand pitchfork and horns above the rest of this lazy, lamentable lattice. Deicide have released other disappointments through their career, but this might have given Jesus the last laugh if they hadn't decided to survive through it.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

After the sludgy down-tempo travesty that was Insineratehymn, just about anything Deicide released was going to be less repugnant. Sure enough, their next release In Torment In Hell is pretty shitty, but it at least listens better than the album that came before it.

In Torment In Hell finds Deicide once again relying on slow groove riffs and shadows of their former style. It’s a very bland album, as the band just pounds through their material as if they were on the clock. The only things that really standout are its negative qualities, such as the plethora of effects the Hoffman brothers attempt to use to cover up the fact that they suck at guitar, or Steve Ashiem’s woodpecker snare. No longer do the riffs grab you by the balls and fling you across the room; now they merely gnaw at your ankles. The odd-time rhythms become increasingly and painfully obvious as the album progresses and everything is arranged in about the most boring way imaginable.

Basically, In Torment In Hell is Insineratehymn the sequel. However, I must admit that this time around it’s better. Fast passages are more abundant, Glen Benton’s growl is even deeper, the general production (discounting the drum sound) is better, and the lyrical content is more authentic than on the previous effort. There is also a surprisingly present thrash vibe at times, making this the first Deicide album to incorporate such ideas since their debut. For a good example, listen to “Vengeance Will Be Mine.” For a bad example, listen to silly shit like “Worry In The House Of Thieves.”

Definitely not recommended material, but there might just be enough substance here to make it a worthwhile purchase.

Unless memory serves me incorrectly, DEICIDE had quite the upbringing in the brutal FL death metal scene, alongside fellow Floridians DEATH and MORBID ANGEL. But while the latter two groups expanded their artistic and compositional reaches with each successive release, Glen Benton and his merry horde of Southern-fried devildom began a sort of musical de-evolutionary process that spanned a number of albums, as the sophisticated businessman of "Once Upon the Cross" slowly transgressed to a peon of the Middle Ages with "Incineratehymn", and once "In Torment in Hell" was spawned forth, DEICIDE entered the musical equivilant of using fire to fight off the mighty thunderlizards.

Simply put, calling this album a mess gives it positive justification. It took four days to write and record, and it obviously shows. Brutality for the sake of brutality is only good in small doses, but if you base your entire musical career and several albums off that alone, then once album # X rolls off the market, the thrill is gone, and a sort of "been there, done that" mentality reigns supreme. Likewise with the lyrics; obviously a band name such as DEICIDE means they liked to pick on God back in high school, but a lyrical obsession with the Horned One only leads to frustrated sighs. And I won't buy "it comes with the territory" as a reasonable excuse; Black Metal bands can at least utilize many different topics into their songs instead of just Satanism (vampirism, nature, nationalism, etc.), so what's DEICIDE's excuse? Although, I can only condemn the production so far, as the folks at Morrisound Studios have produced and released MANY quality albums, so, once again, I blame the band for exposing short-comings in an otherwise great studio. Nice job, guys.

One cannot deny the legacy DEICIDE had in the past. But if they wish to expand upon said legacy even by a modicum, then trudging through shit before entering the same waters they've swam before will only serve to tarnish their image. But I guess once you have the "they never do anything wrong!" fan-base, you needn't worry about releasing quality music. Just look at METALLICA.