Review Summary: Being comparatively better does not equate to being good on its own
It takes approximately 20 seconds of listening to the title track for Scars of the Crucifix to completely blow In Torment in Hell out of the water, as at last we have a seemingly hungry Deicide again waiting to attack the listener with hyper-blasphemous death metal mastery. Unfortunately for the band, these pangs of inspiration don't extend that far outside the confines of track 1, as even though this album is mostly a shift away from the lamentable grooving nonsense that characterized both In Torment in Hell and Insineratehymn, the band still aren't out of the woods yet in terms of making music you want to listen to. A band making something that was less bad than what they had previously made doesn't make the album in question a worthwhile venture, and Scars of the Crucifix is a prime example of that particular scenario.
Above all else, the main issue with Scars of the Crucifix is that the songs, despite being a return to the "classic" Deicide style, pretty much all feel half-baked and underdone. It feels rushed in a different way compared to In Torment in Hell, as unlike that album's slow-motion march to nowhere, this album is a 200m sprint where the runner crosses the field to get to the other straightaway instead of actually running around the turns. It's paint-by-numbers death metal designed to get in and out as fast as possible, with no real variation amongst sections within the songs themselves, and most songs just kind of stop without having a real ending. When a song actually feels like a real song instead of just a random collection of riffs, such as the genuinely great title track and the awesome ending breakdown to "When Heaven Burns", it's more of a surprise to the listener than anything else. The riffs themselves are once again every basic death metal riff you've ever heard in your life, nothing that you can't already hear done way better on Legion or Once Upon the Cross. Some lines pop out to the ear, such as the opening of "When Heaven Burns" and most of "The Pentecostal" before the song turns into a piano recital, but that happens less often than you'd hope for. The drumming is a bit more into it this time, probably because the music isn't trying to walk through quicksand here, but it's still nothing to write home about.
At least you can actually hear the drums on this album, for the production's something of a step up from In Torment in Hell, with more sonic clarity to the overall package, but the primary issue now is that the drums and vocals overpower the guitars to such a degree that you can only slightly make out what the Hoffmans are doing. Maybe that's a good thing, considering they are clearly not into the idea of crafting quality songs. The vocals being the de facto star of the show this time around is an especial issue as Glen Benton's high/low vocal layering is overused to an extreme degree on Scars of the Crucifix. I don't recall earlier albums being so reliant on the vocal layering as this one is, and between the extreme amount of layering at play and the uninteresting vocal lines, it turns trying to listen to the vocals a massive chore. I know it's kind of his "thing" that he does, and when used sparingly and in logical points throughout a song, it can really enhance the impact of a particular section of music. When done to death, as it is on here, it becomes more of a gimmick than anything else, almost as much as Deicide's "3edgy5me" Satanism and anti-Christian lyrics, which are all the same as they were on the last two albums. At least start writing about famous incidents of death and murder like you did on the first album, Glen. It'd do wonders for freshening up the staleness that is Deicide in the early 2000s.
Alas, this was the end of the road for our favorite roid-raging, cyber-busking guitarist brothers, Eric and Brent Hoffman, as they'd depart from Deicide just eight months after the release of Scars of the Crucifix. A whole swamp's worth of mudslinging has occurred between the two and Glen Benton since then, all the way up to just a couple years ago, but Deicide would reconvene and prevail with the quite-frankly career saving marvel that was The Stench of Redemption in 2006. Benton seemed very, very happy to be off Roadrunner and on Earache around this time, so what gives with Scars of the Crucifix sucking so much? Well, Benton says that he and Asheim wrote everything, a stark contrast to the Hoffmans saying they both wrote AND recorded most of this album, so let's say he's the correct one and the Hoffmans had no writing input for this record. Considering his personality and personal hatred of Eric and Brent, I wouldn't be surprised if either A. Glen was so burnt out on trying to work with the Hoffmans that he had no real inspiration for this collection of songs, or B. He intentionally wrote ***ty, boring music just to spite and *** with Eric and Brent. Option A is the much more likely one, but a part of me chuckles at the idea of option B being the true reason behind the paradoxical nature of a seemingly inspired group of musicians making something as banal, been-there-done-that, and, quite frankly, lame as Scars of the Crucifix.
