Review Summary: Like opening the Ark of the Covenant.
Anyone who has listened to Dead Congregation before has known that this record would come. Not just a sophomore release, but THIS album. In 2005, with their EP “Purifying Consecrated Ground”, we got the first whispers of what was to come. “Graves of the Archangels” was simply the next logical step along the path to Promulgation of the Fall. Every single fan of the band that was anticipating this album was awaiting it with bated breath, with the full knowledge that the band would do more than deliver on the high expectations their debut album set them up for.
For the uninitiated, Dead Congregation is a quartet from Athens (Greece, not Georgia) that gives us some beefy death metal in the style of Incantation and Immolation. They do have some doom elements in their death recipe, a-la Autopsy, but they aren’t quite as prominent as they are on Autopsy’s seminal releases Mental Funeral and Severed Survival. As expected, the riffs are monstrous, the drums are pounding and powerful, and the vocals are delivered as inhuman howls. How is this different from any of the other bands active in the burgeoning underground death metal scene? There are a score of active death metal bands with a similar aesthetic, like Bölzer, Cruciamentum, Funebrarum, and Disma, among others, all with a solid output. What sets “Promulgation” apart is that it is not just a solid outing, it is a hole-in-one.
The difference is in how “Promulgation of the Fall” nails pretty much every single thing it sets out to do. It is the most seductive forty minute assault on your senses that you could possibly conceive of. Unlike “Graves,” Promulgation does not give you a wind-up of an intro track, it comes at you without any mercy straight from the get-go. The guitar lines shift between incisive tremolo riffs, stomach-lurching doom-influenced passages, and blazing-fast blackened leads that would put bands like Akercocke and Behemoth to shame. “Graves of the Archangels” suffered from having a few too many build-up passages that functioned more as filler than as appetizers. The band has trimmed these out, and the only thing that doesn’t belong in “Promulgation” is you. By the end of the album, you will feel as if you’ve been put through a woodchipper.
Special mention has to go to the production. The drums on this album sound absolutely perfect, which was something sorely missing from “Graves.” The guitars don’t sound overpolished, but also avoid sounding unpalatably murky. The bass pulses just where it needs to be in the mix, the icing on this cake. Every signature element of Dead Congregation’s sound is present, albeit better in every single possible way.
“Promulgation of the Fall” is a striking example of a band progressing very little in their sound while improving tremendously on their previous efforts. Any fears that the Grecian quartet would succumb to the common “sophomore slump” are wrapped around the blood-stained head of this album’s sonic hammer and returned directly to your face.
