‘For Those In Shallow Graves’ is Decedent’s first full length and it opens with an intense and memorable bang. This album has a ton of attitude, it’s brutal, downtuned chunky Death Metal that blends a variety of influences together while maintaining a sense of cosmic rotting trippiness throughout. The grooves here are bouncy but always heavy. These guys are from Michigan and they remind me approximately of Deeds of Flesh mixed with a dash of Deicide, add the groove of Obituary and the slamming heinousness of something like Devourment: a super mix of brutal sounds within the umbrella of Death Metal blended up and served raw.
The drums, oh man, the drums are both creative and loud as fuck, nailing these killer fills left right and centre. It’s a real treat to hear how this dude engages with the riffs, he’s locked in tight here. He’s using all kinds of different blastbeat variants with snappy and tight work which sounds effortless. However as crazy as the drums are the riffs drive the boat with the chaotic wrangling and progressing of the songs. Stumbling over themselves they are constantly mutating and melting with pitchbends all over the place. There’s some simple breakdown parts used here and there in a Slam context but overall there’s a major wallop guitar wise with a ton of versatility, it’s usually charging ahead leading the band forward. Vocally the band is bringing all kinds of styles to the table which is great. Lows, highs, pig squeals, higher vocals, Slam brutality nastiness and a kind of “Hardcore shout” style too. I think the ‘Hardcore shout’ type style is leaned on a bit much especially considering the dude’s range. I’m not the biggest pig squeal dude ever and there’s a couple on here but it never detracts. The lows are top notch and I can deal with the quantity of pig squeals and some Hardcore influenced vocals. For what it’s worth though he keeps it so varied that even though I don’t love everything about his performance here, I like the majority and it just kicks so much ass. He can handle some impressive creature roars which fit really well too. There’s a two features as well so there’s even more dynamics vocally because of that.
The bass has a super crunchy HM2 tone, it’s fuzzy and intense riding along with the guitars. The bassist holds his end down well. It’s loud and buzzing like a big fly and sounds great gliding around with the drums on ‘Sleepaway Camp’. It lumbers about on one of my favourites ‘Rotted Redeemer’ which has these cymbal hits that totally channel a pickaxe tapping away in a mine deep underground. It’s a spooky effect that works nicely here, same with the B-movie wobbly synth ‘Interlude’ that breaks up the half hour and a bit album’s run time at around the three quarter mark. Atmosphere wise imagine a massive spaceship that has a lower sewer level and an outbreak from the science lab is lurking down there in the depths or that there’s been an incident on a space station thats now crashing down through the Earth’s orbit into a swamp. Science fiction meets body horror like From Beyond or The Thing in a pure audio format. ‘For Those In Shallow Graves’ has a more modern production, this is certainly not a raw album, it’s very thick, wet and warm like a bog in the summertime.
This is a good example of a more modern sounding Death Metal album, from the ‘in your face’ production to the variety of styles the vocalist uses to the super blend of Brutal Death Metal influences musically in general which helps these songs keep you guessing where they are going to go next. The album comes on the heels of a self titled 2023 demo and the ‘Persistent Ruin’ follow up in 2024, along with splits with some hardcore bands on a 5 band split as well as one with Piss Leech, and this album generally improves on that material. They do what they do extremely well and this particular blend of ingredients is working for them.
