Review Summary: A lesson in expectations.
It's been nearly 10 years since Morbid Angel released Illud Divinum Insanus, and in many ways it foreshadowed the failures of many of the other old-school death metal legends that reappeared. Moreover, it is a lesson that no matter how much hype something has, and how good a band once was, the sands of time are not always favourable, and experimentation can go dreadfully wrong. More than some of the other marked failures of their contemporaries (most obviously
Convulse and
Massacre), Illud Divinum Insanus demonstrates the exact ways that a band can tarnish their legacy.
This album is a trainwreck, as everyone knows, but the mistakes made here are actually bafflingly well organised to make the experience as demoralising as possible. The infamously terrible industrial and electronic elements used here are saved for a few specific tracks, but those tracks are placed in such a way that the album never reaches a point of feeling like it's not hitting you over the head with its stupid irritating gimmicks. The first proper track,
Too Extreme, is grating, with a boring synthetic drum beat masking all the guitar work, and it sticks around for a full 6 minutes to properly obliterate your will to listen further. As if to restore some semblance of hope,
Existo Vulgore follows, and is a pretty average death metal track, with no real major issues, but nothing to recommend it over something from Heretic. The weaker vocal performance compared to earlier David Vincent efforts and the Tucker era material starts to become increasingly apparent in these textbook death metal tracks, where his strained delivery is much too high in the mix.
Blades for Baal follows, and is a genuinely pretty good death metal track, with some bite and aggression to the riffs, tidy and compact stucturing, a good chorus, and while the second half is a bit sluggish, the solo that comes with it is good. At this point some hope for the rest of the album has been restored, only to be cut dead in its tracks by 2 very mediocre tracks sans electronics and 1 terrible one with the industrial elements.
I Am Morbid is clearly an attempt at a big anthemic track but unlike Where The Slime Lives, the song structure is extremely annoying, with stop-start verses that sound like they're trying to do a death metal equivalent of an AOR or hair-metal track. It simply just isn't appropriate for their style at all, and the rest of the track stumbles, with riffs trying to venture into more traditional Morbid Angel territory but having to conform to the terrible groove they try to use.
10 More Dead is less offensively bad, but definitely sounds like a more boring and less well conceived version of World of *** (The Promised Land). The abysmal
Destructos vs. the Earth / Attack follows and much like
Too Extreme it's essentially all the bad elements of Tucker-era Morbid Angel with wholly inappropriate and misused electronic elements. It's not quite as bad, as its slower pace gives it some groove and weight, but it's all in vain when there are so many terrible distracting issues with the song structuring, riffs and Vincent's vocals.
Like
Existo Vulgore,
Nevermore seems to be in place mostly to just bail out the album from its terrible experimentation with extremely textbook death metal, but it's more sluggish and reeks of self-plagiarism, using eerily similar riffs and some of Vincent's worst vocals.
Beauty Meets Beast follows and like
Blades for Baal, it's significantly better than the other material here, with a unique feel with a light-footed rhythm that lends it a waltz-quality without actually being in 3/4. It's slightly too long but easily the most original track here and of itself it's a respectable effort. Followed by
Radikult and
Mea Culpa, however, it only feels like a brief respite from the actively terrible tracks on display. All the somewhat positive qualities of the regular death metal tracks seem to only highlight how bad and illogically constructed the industrial tracks are, and aren't especially good themselves, failing to really catch the ear and drag the album out of its pit of failure.
Listening to Convulse's
Cycle of Revenge after this exhibits the core issue with this album; whilst that album was extremely flawed and poorly executed, the fundamental idea could have easily worked with some tweaking. Illud Divinum Insanus is just consistently terrible and attempts to pair the band's older style with totally ill-fitting elements, like water and oil, and simply sounds unlistenably bad at its worst moments. The normal death metal tracks present aren't terrible but are simply not interesting enough, bar Blades for Baal, to ever manage to distract the listener from the fact that an abomination like Radikult is actually on this album, and Trey Azagthoth plays on it. Moreover, this album set the tone for Kingdoms Disdained, which exhibits the same lack of charisma and average death metal songwriting. Altogether, Illud Divinum Insanus is a terrible album and one of the greatest failures from a classic metal band ever; moreover, it set the tone for a relatively weak revival of the old-school death metal elite, in comparison to the reasonably dignified return thrash made.
