Review Summary: Decapitated marry their groovier influences with their extreme rhythmic precision and more experimental songwriting to produce easily their darkest and most sinister album.
Decapitated's style of tech death underwent two main changes over the course of their pre-accident era: Nihility adopted a more rhythmically tight and less traditional style of death metal that felt less like "death metal that is technical" and more like the modern form the genre currently takes. Organic Hallucinosis took the second step and went further into the rhythmic complexity of the band's music, which in turn allowed for the introduction of darker, moodier music.
There is a sinister fury to Organic Hallucinosis that doesn't sound like that of any other death metal album. There's no big emphasis on gore, Satan or cosmic horrors, instead just a swelling anger propelled by mechanical drumming and droning, often completely atonal guitar work. The riffs on the album combine the aggressive thrash tremolo picking of earlier death metal with the rhythmic precision of a band like Meshuggah, and often enter into the same atmospheric focus as those legendary Swedes. For example, the pulverising grooves of the opening track give way to a droning, eerie riff that the band manages to subtly weave melody around in a way that sounds much more natural and well integrated than similarly melodic moments would from other bands. Similarly, the brilliant
Visual Delusion alternates between frantic tremolo picking and haunting melodies without sacrificing the underlying hostility of the music at all, resulting in a remarkably consistent and engaging track. Even
Revelation of Existence, oft regarded the weakest track on the album, pulls some rabbits out of its hat with the swirling, mucky half-muted atmospheric riff in the bridge.
What really catapults Organic Hallucinosis up a tier from the two efforts immediately preceding it is the drumming, which captures the rigid mechanical tightness of Nihility whilst tipping the intensity and complexity over the edge to the point of it feeling like a train about to derail. The ruthlessly aggressive
Day 69 employs this perhaps the best, with the varying rhythmic patterns often alternating between simpler grooves and explosive blast beats in a masterful fashion.
Post Organic also does something similar, with its spirally midway riff being met with an interesting drum pattern with alternating straight 4/4 with delayed snare hits, helping to cement the very weird riff with a consistent rhythmic structure to match it.
There are weaknesses to Organic Hallucinosis, most obviously the rather lacking vocals of Covan which never really provide the same depth or power as the rest of the music. Also of note is the very limited range of melodies chosen by the band here, which isn't crucial because it's not the selling point of the album in any way, but it can lead to some moments blending together. That said, the overall quality and variety in the songwriting structurally helps to mitigate the issue significantly.
It's disappointing that Organic Hallucinosis's unusual style never really became the norm for technical death metal, because it succeeds where other tech death albums fail. Full of tonal depth and without the same superfluous flamboyance as many of their contemporaries, Decapitated's 4th album is one of the great achievements of the genre and easily one of their best albums.
