Straight from the hallowed pages of the Disgorge playback it comes: Chromatic runs, swift and accipitral, plug into the blunt thump of slams. Growls and gurgles flow through and over, the wet Slosh of catarrh slimy on surfaces it buries in damp trails of mucus. The formula is well established but when the result is as abrasive as the alliance of chugs and blastbeats on “Hellish Consumption” the maths adds up anyway. This is a comfortable spot for me. I find peace within the turmoil, the eye in a storm of distortion. That Devastrosity are good at the style is obvious, but in a sense I reviewed the album already simply by outlining the myriad virtues of Disgorge earlier – the blueprint drafted, Devastrosity have followed it so faithfully that their efforts, while deeply enjoyable to me, are virtually cast in stone with little room for the construction of their own personality. Despite the notional constriction the subgenre might place upon your ambitions, there is plenty of space for individualism within brutal death. The instantly recognizable chaos of Malignancy, or Defeated Sanity’s jazz-adjacent technical mastery, or the apocalyptic armageddon heraldry of Disentomb’s grasp on moments of spacious dissonance, or this, or that, or a million things besides. For a followup – which I dearly hope we see – I would be elated for this exceptionally talented bunch to a forge a blade more uniquely their own.
At the risk of seemingly overly critical, let me state emphatically and unambiguously that I really enjoyed this album. I admire it’s purity, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. Each twisting riff on “Cadaveric Feast” slices away like individual teeth on the full saw blade that bites a road through your bones. “Devastate Atrocity” adds flair to it’s turn at war crimes with some devilishly nimble slightly-higher riffing under a flaying edge of gravity blasts. The passion for the music snorts and pounds the earth with cloven hoof with bull-demon aggression that possesses every fibre and note played. I’ve long admired the work of the Indonesian metal scene; every member of every band seems to have five other simultaneous projects active at any one time in this seething nexus of creativity and respect for the genre, and if nothing else bands like Devastrosity prove the absolute folly of restricting one’s search for metal within European or American borders.
But the thing is that I can build a wholly negative review of this in my head very easily, and to an extent I can readily concede every flaw it would outline. The absence of hooks, the sameyness throughout, the way it almost entirely leaves the higher strings on their guitars unmolested, the derivative nature of it...none of those would be invalid complaints, nor would they necessarily be ones i could counteract either. The best i could say as a somewhat limpwristed retort would be that those demerits simply didn't bother me. What that means is that this is strictly one for the existing fan of the genre; it doesn’t have the inventive compositional approach of, say, Wormed that allows that band their due deference even among people who wouldn’t normally take such a rapt interest in brutal death as i do. But if you too pull the same joy out of vicious avalanches of blastbeats, slams, and atonal blitzes of 16th notes, then you could do far worse than indulging in Devastrosity’s fetid charms.
