IMPRECATION In Nomine Diaboli CD

Listening to Imprecation is akin to having your ears syringed of wax after years of poor hearing. Surveying the contemporary death metal landscape offers scant gems. There are apparently many releases boasting worthy talking points. Or so it would seem until one listens to an artist that truly understands the genre as Imprecation do. And suddenly all the passable but overworked material we have been trawling through for months looks surprisingly small, unambitious, lifeless, and melts away into the caverns of forgetfulness. We can hear clearly again. ‘In Nomine Diaboli’ is a rich concoction of the best elements of early Deicide, Morbid Angel, and Incantation. But these familiar touchstones are manipulated and shaped into a fluid, occultist, imposing and genuinely enthralling work of dark metal. Imprecation pivot on a stop/start attitude to tempo, throwing lumbering faster passages against the sheer weight of short, droning doom segments, throwing riffs as artillery to bridge across this stilted framework. For all its premeditated malevolence however, there is a joy and playfulness to the Imprecation style rarely seen in death metal. It swaggers forth with a degree of self-confidence and poise that lends the entire album a degree of exhilaration that stands in stark contrast to the overworked conceptual material of newer death metal entities. It not only fashions a world of formless terrors before the listener’s ears, it invites us in, energising us to partake in the chaos. The guitar tone is truly monolithic, serviceable for both death/doom and barrages of dark, blackened grind that throw themselves across these tracks in rampant blitzkriegs of noise. Despite the cavernously low tuning, we lose no articulation during the choppier, percussive segments of these tracks, with the tone always appearing at the brink of utter disintegration but never entirely losing solidity. Drums, despite their organic qualities, more than meet the moment for sheer power and theatre. The performance may not be the most technical going, but any laboured ancillary flourishes would be superfluous. All that is required is the tight, subtle rhythmic framing, upsetting the narrative with choppy blast-beats and stilted fills serving as threads connecting competing degrees of intensity. Vocals are guttural but also strangely fraught emotionally, heightening the melodrama in an odd juxtaposition of the human and the monstrous. Minimal keyboards are deployed at key dramatic junctures, adding a degree of nightmarish fanfare by following the guitar lines with their occultist mysticism to the fray. ‘In Nomine Diaboli’ is not an explicit “genre” release. By that I mean that it is neither self-consciously old school in orientation (bearing in mind that Imprecation are veterans of Texan death metal), nor is it preoccupied with the future. It draws on a range of elements from death and black metal but is ultimately a work that is entirely self-justificatory. It is at once a celebration of all that is still great about quality death metal, from individuals with an intimate degree of knowledge and understanding of the genre and what grants it a unique standing amongst metal stylings. And this ultimately means that this album stands entirely distinct from the vast majority of comparable releases coming out at the moment. The veil has been lifted, and those of us hunting for scraps within the qualitative frugalities of modern death metal have had our prayers answered and our eyes opened by ‘In Nomine Diaboli’, undoubtably a reacquaintance of our love for this genre. An oddly life affirming experience via this intoxicatingly violent form of music. Originally published at Hate Meditations