Review Summary: It's in his name we suffer.
Death metal’s favorite unapologetic blasphemers Deicide must feel their shoulders heavy, being one of the most influential and most successful bands in the history of the genre. Never shying away from provocation and controversy, Glen Benton and his crew have led a long career of spewing profane extreme music, and producing some unambiguously quintessential albums in more than three decades of existence, which will forever sit comfortably in this music’s pantheon. Still, it has not always been bright for the band especially from 2000 and onward, a time period that features (with 2006’s The Stench of Redemption being a blazing exception) a series of sub optimal, if not completely skippable releases. Deicide managed to push back in the right direction with 2018’s visually and musically solid Overtures of Blasphemy. Six years following that, Deicide’s 13th full length album Banished by Sin looks at first glance, surprisingly ugly.
Such a choice of a cover sparked discussions well before the fans even listened to the first singles off the record, but without getting into the arguments of each side, I just have to say that it’s simply a pretty deplorable piece of art. A significant downgrade from their last album’s amazing cover, the design looks like it’s trying to con you it’s evil without having any real substance, much like annoyingly fake CGIs in movies, it ironically gave me hope that humanity has actually not been completely overtaken by machines just yet, as we apparently can still do some things way better. After the listener has closed their eyes in grievance of this phoniness, at least the music in Banished by Sin does have some meat in it here and there, and it provides a decent overview of all the well known characteristics of the band. Deicide do not deviate from their usual lyrical themes at all, expressing their pretty straightforward anti-religious mindset through overly combative death metal strongly in the comfort zone of the band. You’ve probably heard iterations of the riffs in Banished by Sin, somewhere in their previous albums.
Having a loud and crispy production, the album opens with a punchy attitude in “From Unknown Heights You Shall Fall” and sticks to the same wavelength for almost 40 minutes. Benton’s fierce, gnarly vocals are a highlight, coming across as angry and heinous as the band is supposed to be, and thankfully there’s no soft spot in his delivery. While he doesn’t sound as unhinged as in the past, or with the same variety, his voice does the trick in boosting the already enraged tracks even more. A lot of soloing takes place and truly enhances the compositions, which otherwise feature a mixture of standard Deicide guitar lines that sometimes hit hard, but also sometimes fall flat. While tracks like “Faithless”, “Failures of Your Dying Lord”, the self-titled one or “The Trinity of None” contain the more memorable moments of the album, Banished by Sin still partly suffers from blatant song writing, mostly evident in “Ritual Defied”, “Woke from God” and “Sever the Tongue”. The band almost tries to imitate classic melodies from their first album in “Doomed We Die”, and while “Bury the Cross…” hits hard, the penultimate track “I Am I… The Curse of Death” is a clear filler. Lastly, a more glorious section towards the end of “The Light Defeated” lightly expands the dynamics of the album and fits well as a concluding piece for the record.
Still, most of the song structures here are pretty predictable and on the more easy-to-listen side of things, so fans of challenging or perplexed death metal will most likely yawn repeatedly when going through this. To my ears, Banished by Sin by no means achieves as much as Overtures of Blasphemy, but it isn’t a disaster like a few of its predecessors either. The frequent change of the quality of the tracks in the album may undermine its overall tightness yet it still doesn’t bring it down to the ground, and if there’s anything you’ll pick up from it, it’s perhaps a couple of tracks, each to their own. There’s a fair dose of Deicide’s venom in Banished by Sin, but for the love of Satan, never pick a front cover like that again.
