Glorious Depravity features members of Pyrrhon, Woe, and Gravesend. Their new album Death Never Sleeps (Transcending Obscurity Records) takes you back to the days when death metal crawled from the bloody carnage of thrash, which left the knack for songwriting with hooks over sheer brutality intact. Doug Moore’s guttural growls are articulated enough to keep them from being just a gurgle, and allow them to give you a hint of what the song’s about. The riffing on “Stripmined Flesh Extractor” is coherent enough to give it an almost Megadeth-like groove. They tap into the darker tension that fuels Slayer’s vibe for “Freshkills Poltergeist.” They are not doing anything new here; they are just doing it right.

The feeling the music brings finds the notes all being executed with the expected flair, but a lingering sense that given the bands these guys are from and the scene surrounding them, they are just metal nerds who, in real life, are not aggressive people. It’s a sense that you can not fake, much like the funk, and is also what sells a band like Cannibal Corpse differently. Corpsegrinder is a big WoW-playing teddy bear of a guy, who at least appreciates violence in a fantasy setting. This might make him a more aggressive person; maybe they are also just larger dudes with more testosterone, whereas this band is likely eating tofu in Brooklyn. The chugs begin to run together midway through the album, with enough gallops to perk your ears up here and there.

“The Devouring Dust” carries enough to get you re-invested in what they are doing, even if it leans in a blast direction at times. “Carnage at the Margins” finds the vocals digging into a lower gurgle at times on the verses, and a more Slayer-tinged aggression in other places. The title track that closes the album is more deliberate than the previous song, which tried too hard. This album, from a performance and production standpoint, is very solid and captures the feel they were going for and cares about songwriting, though it’s a very competitive year for this genre, so it will likely get overlooked in some circles. However, if you are a fan of old school death metal that found a balance of brutality with songwriting hooks in the mid-nineties, then you are going to be sold on this album, as it sells you that sense of nostalgia without being enslaved to it. Not the heaviest album of the year, but it’s certainly worth a listen for all fans of the genre.

Buy the album here:
https://ampwall.com/a/transcendingobscurity/album/death-never-sleeps

8 / 10
WIL CIFER
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