Review Summary: 2:14 of track 3 is all you really need to hear
The early 2000s was a time where metal was overrun with JNCO jean-wearing, spiky hair styling, entirely-too-reliant-on-the-word-"***"-saying doofy fools whose music would somehow become more dated and passé than the poofiest drippy dick glam bands of the 80s. Luckily for the world of death metal, Deicide never sank to depths that low, but refusing to hop on trends never stopped them from making ***ty albums, now did it? The mainstream music industry's brief fascination with death metal having ended some time prior, Roadrunner Records, one of the labels primarily responsible for this boom period, was switching gears away from extreme music in a manner most becoming of a professional, well-to-do outfit: By refusing to promote any of their death metal bands and causing all of them to get the *** out of dodge sooner rather than later. It's often a case in a band's history where in order to get out of a record contract, they'll intentionally phone in a final recording just to be able to finish up the deal and split. Sometimes, the band's intentions are accidentally subverted, and the record in question is a masterpiece that is much beloved by the fanbase at large (see: Vempire by Cradle of Filth). Not the case with In Torment in Hell, an album that was designed solely to be able to say "So long, and thanks for all beer" to the label that decided that Nickelback was a worthwhile endeavor, and one that's every bit as bad as the band wanted it to be.
Now, the fact that Deicide intentionally made an album they considered to be bad does not really mean that much, as they were already in a musical slump to begin with. The band had already put out one uninspired slog in Insineratehymn the year prior, and would make another one in Scars of the Crucifix three years later. It's just that In Torment in Hell is the ur-example of this downward shift in quality for the band, a disappointing one considering how phenomenally great their first four records had been. Maybe this record is more of a chore to sit through because of that ill-intention on the part of the band, but this album would have been able to put Edward Norton to sleep in Fight Club. At least Insineratehymn made an attempt to freshen up their sound by building around slower tempos and groovier riffs. I mean, it didn't work, but A for effort? This whole thing sounds like if you loaded that record up on Youtube and set the player speed to x.25. It's a death metal record being heard in slow motion, and it renders already drudging bores like the title track and "Worry in the House of Thieves" to previously unthinkable level of monotony. Everything just sludges along at a snail's pace, the urgency of the product having been left to the wolves. The riffs themselves are bog standard at absolute best, all of them being the same sort of high string tremolo picking and chunky chugging heard on the earlier, better albums, with none of the inventive catchiness Deicide had previously peppered their music with to be found. Everyone on this record just sounds totally done and over with it, and it shines through in almost every second of runtime. When a sub-3 minute tune like "Christ Don't Care" feels like you're watching some overlong Lars von Trier theatrical snoozefest*, you know something has gone terribly wrong.
Compounding all of these musical inadequacies is the quite frankly wretched production. Remember when I said that it sounds like you're listening to Deicide in slow motion? Well, I left out a crucial detail: It sounds like you're listening to Deicide in slow motion at the bottom of an Olympic swimming pool. The drums in particular have been especially neglected, lower in volume than every other element, with faint kick drums and tiny little boops for toms. The snare has that same annoying "electronic" sound that Insineratehymn's snare has, only slightly less agitating here thanks to its duller tone. The band's reasoning for the crap production quality was the label rushing them to get it out by summer's end that year, but considering that they're very obviously phoning it in on purpose (which, to repeat, is quite a feat considering they were smack dab in the middle of their dork age), I wouldn't put it past them to have not really given much of a damn in this department either. Muffled and muddied, not too dissimilar to burying your early 2000s boombox in the backyard while keeping the album on and attempting to listen to it through the ground. As if there'd be much to try and decipher in a scenario like that anyway, for barked and shrieked through the familiar throat of Glen Benton are the most generic, uninteresting lyrics he's ever penned. The well of "Jesus sucks, hail Satan" had been more than tapped by album #3, so the words he speaks are particularly dull and dreary here in the year of our Lord 2001.
Are there any parts of this album I found to be at the very least tolerable? Well, "Child of God" is totally fine for the most part. Sure, it's still a bit too slow, but it's a straightforward, if repetitious, death metal song and lacks much of the insipid grooving that permeates just about every other part of the record, so kudos for that, I guess. The cover art is also pretty much okay, albeit near the low end of Deicide album arts when compared to Once Upon the Cross or later efforts like Overtures of Blasphemy. Apparently the final art used on release was a last-minute replacement, as the original art was deemed to be too controversial to release, being a menagerie of sexual acts performed upon religious figures. The original art is floating around online, and I'm more inclined to believe that it was rejected less for its graphic depictions of religious violence and more for looking like something a 5 year old drew in kindergarten right before nap time. There's also a tiny snippet of "Vengeance Will Be Mine", the track 3 that the title of this review refers to, where you can hear Benton make noises that have been popularly described as him getting railed in the butt. Obviously, that's not how those sounds were accomplished in the studio (probably), but it's so goofy and out of place that it warrants a chuckle with each listen. Beyond that, though this is a barren wasteland where creativity goes to die, with just about no redeeming factors left to survive. Deicide wouldn't be totally out of the woods yet, as Scars of the Crucifix was to follow this mess of an album, and they'd still have at least one record afterwards that'd be not really worth taking the time to listen to in Till Death Do Us Part, but The Stench of Redemption was on the horizon, and they'd finally find their way again with In the Minds of Evil and the utterly fantastic Overtures of Blasphemy almost 20 years later, but for now, and to this day, In Torment in Hell remains the all time stinkaroo of Deicide's catalog.
*Antichrist is a pretentious pile of crap and I'm amazed that anybody thinks it's some groundbreaking horror piece. Lars von Trier sucks and he once got himself banned from Cannes for joking around that he understood Hitler.
