Review Summary: Angst essen Verstand auf
Without a shadow of a doubt, 2024 has been an incredible year for extreme music. In the brutal death metal microcosm alone, we were gifted with albums by stalwart acts like Brodequin, Wormed and Malignancy, to skim just the top layer of the Petri dish. Zoom out by even the tiniest of factors, and you'll realize that the death metal scene as a whole has produced an inconceivably gigantic heap of high-end releases this year, no small number of which are bordering on classic territory. It's not quite a "step aside, 1991 and 1993" type of situation, but this is arguably the closest the genre has gotten to rivaling that golden era since the honeymoon phase of the old school revival movement started by the likes of Dead Congregation in the 2000s and culminating in landmarks like Blood Incantation's
Starspawn almost a decade ago. Just as the orb transporting us through the void is nearing the completion of yet another run around the incandescent plasma sphere that will swallow it whole some five billion years from now, we are treated to what may very well be Germany’s most significant contribution to world peace since time immemorial – or at least since
The Sanguinary Impetus.
Not many bands can pride themselves on a discography as consistently ambitious and uncompromisingly honest as Defeated Sanity's. The originally German-based four-piece have been at it for more than 30 years, releasing one milestone album after another despite constant lineup changes, and slowly but steadily winning over fans and critics alike with their jazzy, free-spirited approach to a genre otherwise notorious for its reliance on tried and true formulae and stylistic devices. Once confined to the murkiest of undergrounds, they have become so widely revered that you'd be hard-pressed to find any reputable brutal death metal musician not singing their praises.
While it would have always been easy to reduce the magnitude of the band's achievement to (sole discog-spanning member) Lille Gruber’s playful and undeniably exceptional handling of the pedals and sticks, their sound has never been characterized by a tendency to place either technicality or sheer brute force above all else, which separates them from the bulk of their peers. On the contrary, with a little bit of disregard for their crude beginnings, they're an organic clockwork first and foremost, a living, breathing, hive-like monolith emitting continually modulating pulses of detrition, a neural network synced to create overpowering sound waves crashing on the listener's membranae tympanicae.
Chronicles of Lunacy perfectly illustrates this phenomenon: Yes, both technical prowess and compositional savagery once again play an integral part in producing the overall result, but it's the seamless writing and the sensation of listening to a group of human beings creating all these objectively repulsive noises with the mutual understanding of a Vulcan mind meld that elevate Defeated Sanity's latest offering from a competent death metal album to an outstanding one. It won't take more than a couple of minutes to hammer that point home, as opener "Amputationsdrang" wastes no time and gets right to the point, putting the band's resourcefulness on display. After ramping up from a brief straightforward section to syncopated staccato action and stompy Disgorge nods in short order, tension is resolved in a surprisingly laid-back, drum-centric outro simultaneously serving as a segue into the second track, "The Odour of Sanctity". The band's ability to cram this many elements into a song with a duration this short without it coming off as goofy or feeling like a glued, lifeless sequence of contradicting set pieces constitutes a major selling point and serves as a common thread in the context of the album's entire 33-minute runtime.
That's not to say the output is completely devoid of whacky moments. When Gary Oldman, after putting his trust in the world's most eccentric hairdresser, "condemns you to eternal hunger for living blood", or a pre-Uber Robert De Niro notes that, "someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets", the listener catches a fleeting glimpse of the unadulterated fun the lads had with putting the finishing touches on this latest work of theirs. On a more basic level, this good-time pathos also applies to the songwriting. Whether they're switching to a decidedly modern tech wizardry mode for a bar or two ("Accelerating the Rot", "Extrinsically Enraged"), or simply channeling their inner Suffo megafan while slam-waltzing your speakers into submission, Gruber and his cohorts feel no shame wearing their inspirations on their sleeves as long as it helps advance the ultimate goal of making each song a distinctive and compelling standalone experience. All the while, none of it feels derivative, because the driving forces are assimilation and integration, not emulation and adulation (nor frustration all over the nation, for the one closeted DJ Bobo fan reading this).
Dissecting the material from a merely technical standpoint, it should come to no surprise that these highly gifted musicians are pulling all the stops to make the songs match their band's name, but they never fall into the trap of swaggeritis that often plagues high-profile tech death and brutal tech outfits. There's a palpable menace, an unshakable feeling that these guys could go completely nuts on you any second, and they do at several points, but for the most part, they opted to contain themselves, dishing out slabs of controlled, refined chaos and pinpoint-temperate violence instead. The fully fledged off-beat slam section of "A Patriarchy Perverse" is a prime example of the band exhibiting their chops without the need for tweedlefests or nonstop breakneck speed. The ultimate flex, however, is the incessant interplay of odd time signatures, intricate polyrhythms, traditional blast passages and utterly pulverizing slam breaks, which creates the ensemble's characteristic atmosphere of perpetual disorientation – a feat very few bands are able to satisfyingly pull off in the first place, and even fewer have perfected in the way these gentlemen have. I'm blown away by how much they’ve nailed it here.
Lille's ineluctable presence will beyond question be the star of the show for many a listener, the generational drummer enhancing every single moment with flair and savant-like technique, but it would be an injustice to disregard the rhythm section's other half, Jacob Schmidt. The bassist not only amplifies the riffs' impact with thundering, yet effectively standard backing, but often takes center stage with his prominent, at times ludicrously fast fret dances, be it during the deliberately jazzy moments or as the de facto protagonist of select conventional elements ("Condemned to Vascular Famine"). It's unclear how much of the guitars was written by new axeman Vaughn Stoffey and what percentage of them Gruber, who handled both guitar and drum duties on
Impetus, came up with: this in itself and conversely is proof that the guitarist is a perfect fit. Either way, the fact that
Chronicles, permeated by a vibe of consonance, feels even more coherent, even more so than their previous effort, speaks volumes to his sense for the band's needs.
All that dexterity and honed craft cries out for a production job giving each instrument room to breathe, and it's only fitting the band went with the man whose phone probably has to be charged four times a day, because he must be getting a new notification every 15 seconds at this point. When I mentioned that this has been an incredible year for death metal, what I secretly meant was that this has been an even more incredible, albeit somewhat tragic year for Colin Marston. From remixing and remastering beloved Imperial Triumphant classic
Vile Luxury to producing Pyrrhon's latest outing, he has played an essential role in shaping the genre's 2024 landscape, seeing no less than 25 EPs and albums he's worked on come out this year. Sadly, this second Defeated Sanity release he's mixed and mastered seems to be his old studio's last hurrah, as The Thousand Caves, a household name for years, was forced to close its, err, entry holes. On the bright side, this album could also be considered Colin's ma(r)sterpiece. Each instrument is presented with clarity and purpose. The drums sound punchy but natural, the bass, audible at all times, ranges from buzzing to pinching, and the vocals, performed by Josh Welshman, the only vocalist who has made it through two of the band's albums so far, come out feral without ever getting obtrusive. Compared to
The Sanguinary Impetus, everything sounds chunkier and at the same time more precise. In addition to making the analog part of the music sound the best it can, Marston also added little accents like impact hit samples and some tastefully sparse synths, mostly in the form of an outro/intro leading into cathartic closer "Heredity Violated". These tidbits add to the album's grandeur while being understated enough to not distract from the fact that we're dealing with music that, although intelligently so, is ferocious at its core.
Chronicles of Lunacy is nothing short of a triumph. Near-unmatched in its merging of technical execution, unbound imaginativeness and intransigent aggression, it manages to stand out from the sea of standouts that is 2024's death metal release calendar. In a nutshell, it is everything even the most diehard fans could have asked for and more: a showcase of Defeated Sanity's virtues, offering an unfiltered perspective on the inner workings of a collective that strives not to please, but to devastate what little is left of our senses.
