Deteriorot has been in the game for a minute, releasing their premiere demo back in 1992 and originally forming as a group two years prior. An unearthed treasure of ‘90’s-style American Death Metal, thirty five years on we have their fourth full length work ‘Awakening’. An album chock-full of crazy shredding solos, plenty of mid paced ‘Terminator in the police station’ parts and slower more ritualistic big lumbering beast sections. It kicks off with a big bombastic opening and then quickly slides into the madness.
The guitar tone is of the thick swampy HM-2 variety while the bass lurks beneath the mud with a very classic ‘rounded’ sounding medium/low tone that is similar to the bass tone from the ‘Mental Funeral’ album by fellow Americans Autopsy. The vocals are mostly grim necromancer grunts with some cavern dweller calls out into the darkness that are more raspy and less grunted. Drumming wise the snare tone is like wet cardboard, very mushy like he’s playing a giant’s gargantuan sized drumset with his bare hands, whereas the rest of drums are very punchy and abrasive. I love the production on this album it’s ‘modern old school’ sounding. The drummer has a fairly fill-heavy style and has a feel for keeping his parts flowing and advancing along with the riffs.
‘Horrors in an Everlasting Nightmare’ opens like a soundtrack to a Victorian grave-robber’s grim work of digging up corpses to sell to medical students, picking the lock on a crypt and looking for his prize within, accompanied by these whispered vocals. Then it moves to an eerie tremolo part and some humongous rhythm guitar which can only be described as a ‘big man on the ranch’ sounding part – booming tom work drum wise, it’s massive sounding. Another highlight for me was ‘Winter Moon’ the ninth track, the way the tremelo comes in like a blizzard and the big heavy chugging monster riff like a kaiju destroying a city. Just classic ‘fuck yeah’ Death Metal material that’s not trying to be anything more or anything extra.
There’s a rule for Extreme Metal where the majority of albums with an evil castle on the cover are going to be good, it’s just the way it is. Lo and behold, we have a spooky old castle on the album and it’s another good one. Compared to some of their peers in the scene four albums in thirty-five years doesn’t feel like a huge output of material, however quality is always better than quantity for the sake of quantity. This is a good old fashioned meat and potatoes Death Metal album from the United States. It does its thing and then ends very abruptly, almost startlingly so which was notable. I’m glad to see these guys keep at it and I enjoyed the latest work.
