Review Summary: Truly putting the "death" in death metal, Consuming Impulse delivers one of the most tightly constructed and shocking auditory experiences around to this day
After their impressive debut with the death/thrash Malleus Maleficarum, Pestilence took a big step towards defining the new death metal sound with Consuming Impulse (or Consvming Impvlse, if you are so inclined to "trvth" and whatnot). Noticeable slower and more refined than their debut, it manages to be both violent and eerie in a way other classic death metal bands struggle to imitate.
Dehydrated opens the album as the simplest song on the album, with a searing tremolo picked riff, but the big leap in sound is heard with Martin Van Drunen's vocals. Gone are the pseudo-shouts of Malleus and instead the most tortured, agonized growls in death metal are in; no wonder he is often considered the greatest death metal vocalist of all time after this. His performance sells the big theme of most of the songs, which is, suitably, death, but it doesn't feel as cheap as other death metal bands thanks to the pleasingly morbid lyricism of Van Drunen and drummer Marco Foddis.
Take the legendary "Out of the Body", which is as good as it gets in terms of the actual music with razor sharp riffs and potent groove. Thanks to Van Drunen's vocals, the band can really sell the lyrics about a sinister micro-organism eating you from the inside out: "Creatures living in my veins, the horror, frightening, sickening, the pain that I am bearing, begging, please get them out of my body". The music itself often captures the varied lyrical themes with dissonant searing chords such as on The Trauma, which impresses with its shifting speeds, especially with the core spoken word section backed by vicious double-time drums. Suspended Animation and Chronic Infection use some fun keyboard effects, with the latter using a bell section during its central chorus, which veers into spidery, alien technical death metal and closes with one of the most evil riffs put to tape.
Best of all is the uncanny hookiness the album holds. Few extreme metal bands even now are capable of putting together a catchy riff but Pestilence nail it on every song. The Process of Suffocation ruthlessly bulldozes along with a vicious main riff backed by a simple double bass groove that gives it excellent power and that doesn't overcomplicate the sound. Deify Thy Master opens with about the meanest intro of any track with its crushing
Sepultura-esque tremolo picking backing a washy and dry wah riff.
Throughout, there are numerous sections with major tempo changes which lend a cinematic quality to all the songs, and the impressive restraint shown throughout keeps every song feeling briskly paced and tidily organized. This aids the most twisted moments in feeling truly shocking, such as the aforementioned Deify Thy Master's mid-course where it shudders into a tortured and unnatural slow guitar harmony that sounds like if aliens tried writing music only having listened to that one very evil part of "Visions from the Dark Side".
In spite of their simple bag of tricks and lack of overt technicality on most of the songs, Pestilence delivered one of the best death metal albums of all time with Consuming Impulse. Catchy, groovy, and with one of the most shocking vocal performances ever, it serves as a landmark of the genre, and may possibly be the best death metal album of the 80s, an impressive feat given its competition including the notorious Altars of Madness from the same year.
