Hymns of the Sick

So this album is really easier to remember as the first release of United Guttural rather than the first Deaden album, because no one in particular cares about Dead (apart from, apparently, United Guttural, as well as a legion of death metal fans who love to talk about how 'totally sick' the band is without being able to name a single song title as being particularly ill). It is not a particularly memorable record on its own terms, which is rather fitting considering how particularly unmemorable United Guttural was as a label (at least before they got gobbled up by Deathgasm; I didn't know hostile acquisitions really occurred in underground record labels). Reflecting this particular dimension of unmemorability again is some of the most drab cover art ever: a deeply pixelated and poorly stretched picture of some sort of wounded male genitalia (?) which, if it were a half decade later, would certainly have been pulled from the illustrious pages of Google Image Search, with a similarly dreary splaying of logo and title over the top. They do get points for the title font though, as if 'Hymns Of The Sick' was an entry in a fifteen year old girl named Brenna's diary.

The career trajectory of Deaden is remarkably similar to that of Devourment, just minus the actual success and legitimate notoriety of the latter band in favor of a weak breed of third-tier recognition from guys in 3XL Fleshgrind shirts. Both bands released their first album in the late '90s, went into hibernation for a while, and popped back up in the mid '00s to the delight of the six people each who recognized them from before. However, there's another point of divergence in this analogy, where 'Molesting The Decapitated' was a great album and a landmark for slam death, but 'Hymns Of The Sick' is more one of those generic brutal death albums that a handful of people have arbitrarily selected as being exceptional. I don't know either.

There's exactly two musical sections that I remember from this album: the opening riff on the first track, which is notable for being really irritating with high... somethings, and the opening section of 'Land Of Larvae' which has some really cool crusty Bolt Thrower-style riffing before they decide to cock it up with a bunch of fluttery hand movements on the fretboard. The rest of it is just sort of a blur; it's got almost nauseatingly flat mid-'90s DM production, a lot of pretty boring tremolo riffs that seem restricted to the first through fourth frets on E and A, uninteresting grunty vocals, and, of course, a lot of midpaced chug riffs. Oddly enough, I don't think there's any blasting (apart from on 'He Wore The Flesh' and the beginning of 'John's List'); the fastest this really gets is an uptempo thrash level. And no, that doesn't go to make it any more interesting.

My enjoyment of this is pretty directly tied to mood. If I feel like enjoying this album, I can somehow get past the almost fundamentally mediocre writing and just enjoy the fact that it's a decent, boring death metal album. To its credit, I can't claim that this is very generic; while some similarities are present to other mid-'90s DM artists, the style is a bit specific as far as drumming and song structures go, though I'd be hard pressed to actually tell you HOW they're unique. There's news samples that are deeply uninteresting. It's almost like Deaden wanted to attempt a sort of new style of death metal with this album, concentrating on somewhat convoluted midpaced grooves instead of more straightforward sections. To some degree, I guess, they succeeded.

Here's something they DIDN'T succeed in though: making an interesting album! Hahaha! But seriously I wouldn't buy this.