Album Review: Diatribes - Degenerate
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Look, I love OSDM. It’s a huge part of my musical DNA and while I do tend to prefer the blastier, gurglier sides of the genre those early efforts by Deicide, Incantation and a hundred others are formative to the way I think about and approach music. They’re a bedrock of sorts, a springboard from which I’ve dived into so much of the rest of the genre, and to date if I can’t think of anything else to put on whatever I’m listening to is likely to be one entry or another from that glorious, rancorous subsection of the genre. It’s such a colourful, varied outcropping with limitless crannies to spelunk within, that even if I vehemently disagree with the tiresome curmudgeons that assert that the genre never got better than it was in the 80’s/early 90’s, I can at least concede that those albums are worth the covetous attitude they seem to inspire. But you can’t just imitate the glory days and expect your own efforts to be as laudable. And, misfortunate as it may be, that looks to be in part what has beset Diatribes on “Degenerate”.
This thing is old school to a fault, lashed fast to the thrash and death ways of yore with bullet-belted anaconda coils. You can hear it, so clearly it barely warrants remarking upon, screaming bloody gore in seven churches somewhere south of heaven. And there’s nothing wrong with that - if you do it well. But it’s that same back-to-basics approach combined with slapdash playing that comprehensively stimies Diatribe’s ambitions. Trotsky, in the imposing tome that is his “History of the Russian Revolution”, outlines the following about police spies reporting on Rasputin and his seemingly interminable state of inebriation: “Thus for months and years the melody was played on three keys: “Pretty drunk,” “Very drunk,” and “Completely drunk”. Similar things could be said of this album as I swear the playing becomes looser the longer the album goes on. What time signature is the section at 2.01 in “Last Enemy” meant to be in? Why is it played in the rhythm of a washing machine having a heart attack? Stick with the song for a moment – listen to the sheer amount of notes in the tremolo section from 3.06 onwards that sound as though they’re being played for the first time by a thirteen year old trying to dodge Zulu warriors attacking him with blow darts from the bushes. I’m not a stickler for atomic-clock precision in my metal albums, but this really does tip over the edge into feeling a bit amateurish at points, which would matter less if every riff was conceptually awesome, but when so many are so stock standard it becomes harder to overlook haphazard execution.
“Swamp Spirits” is a bit of twangy good ‘ol boy slide blues, and I imagine it’s what hold music in Alabama sounds like. It’s awkward and incongruent, but even at their best, the songs here are sadly just “o.k” for the most part. “Hostility Within” commits no sins beyond forgiveness, but every second of it is predictable, using factory standard patterns that get the job done but seldom prove exciting or noteworthy. More livid cuts got a little head bop out of me, but truly great death metal has me headbanging hard enough to dislocate my spine. I need enough visits to a chiropractor to put his children through university once “Warmaster” or “Cause of Death” are done with me, but none of that suicidal urge to crush my invertebral discs to powder ever seemed to strike me when “Degenerate” instead was the soundtrack.
Solos are random splats of (possibly improvised) 16th notes and wah-pedal assault, squealing like bats in a centrifuge. Have you ever heard what sonar actually sounds like? It’s a hateful squiggle of piercing high frequencies that feels like having a dental drill pushed into your eardrums, and the guitar solos Diatribes give us here feel something like a close cousin to it – not exactly the same, but you can tell that they’re related. Speaking of related – plenty of bands cite Slayer as an influence, but even so pilfering a riff from “Mandatory Suicide” on “Masquerade” is a bit on the cheeky side. And perhaps it’s just me, but listen to “Lost Soul”; in particular the bit at 0.24. Then listen to Danny Elfman’s theme for Tim Burton’s “Batman” back in 1989. Now, I have been huffing a lot of paint thinner lately, but…there’s a similarity there, right? But it’s not difficult to complain; being from Yorkshire, it’s a talent that’s practically encoded into my genes. Lets instead fish for saving graces. And there are some – The bass tone for instance. Bulky, apparent, complimentary to but not buried within the mix. If you – whoever you are and whyever you would care about my opinion – want an easy way to score points with me, for the love of god, make your bass a distinct entity within the production. Some tracks even have cool bits in! “Empire of Hate” plays with its rhythms, crunchy triplets above the dancing acid rain of a lead line above, before firing off into the distance with blastbeats. Things collapse a bit with a sloppier melodic passage at 1.48 in which you can hear the guitars desync repeatedly, but for a second there, there was a spark of something that might have worked out were it tightened and honed, made a more formidable implement simply for greater application of the whetstone.
It’s frustrating, but the problem is twofold: A lot of these tracks are shackled down by performance missteps, but even if everything were polished to a mirror sheen, these songs would still be pretty average overall. Take “Brutal Sarcasm” for example; the solo sounds like a dolphin argument. Wedge Yngwie in there and of course the song is much improved for it – but you’d have to do a similar reinvention of every other bit of the song in order to pluck it from “o.k with a great solo” to “great all round”. Almost thirty six years ago now, Deicide released a debut that sounds in a lot of ways like an idealised version of what this album was trying to be – with the unpalatable speedbump that Diatribes can’t come close to writing anything as phenomenal as “Dead by Dawn” (to say nothing of the far superior “Legion” release two years later). It’s not all bad for certain, there are some decently animalistic riffs here and there (“The Witch” having a surfeit of appreciably hazardous clippings from classic thrash – 0.58 for one example among others), and the production is something I can wholly embrace. I also like that they haven’t detuned so far that they could use their E string for a g string. But I can’t escape the suspicion that hereafter I would only ever play this one as backing music. Listened to attentively, the songs only begin to stand out when they do something untoward – solos that sound like they were recorded in the middle of a train collision, slipshod attempts at dual guitar leads, offputting rural blues cuts that sound like they could’ve been ripped out of that “Deliverance” movie where a bunch of guys are menaced by rednecks. Maybe Diatribes and their take on an evergreen if defiantly retro sound will be what the doctor ordered for you, but in a crowded field of contemporary and nostalgic alternatives It feels like stretch to suggest Diatribes as worthy listening unless you are somehow starved of worthy death metal.
Congratulations, you managed to write the most pretentious review possible about a death metal album and yet you said practically nothing relevant.
Amidst Leon Trotsky, Rasputin, Zulu, washing machine, dolphin and Batman, it became quite clear that your biggest concern was not analyzing music — it was trying to prove how smart you think you are. Spoiler: it didn’t work.
You didn’t write a review, you wrote a parade of random metaphors trying to mask a shallow argument. It’s like someone who can’t explain what they heard and starts inventing meaningless comparisons to see if it sticks.
Turning it into a dramatic theater worthy of an academic thesis only shows that you needed to exaggerate because you didn’t have enough content to support your own opinion.
And this “old school” police attitude is the most tired thing there is. If it’s not a Deicide or Slayer clone, it becomes a problem. But if it were a hyped foreign band doing exactly the same thing, you were calling it “raw,” “organic,” and “true to its roots.” This script has been worn out for decades. In the end, your review sounds exactly like what you tried to criticize: disorganized, exaggerated, and full of noise. The difference is that bad music can be skipped — your writing, unfortunately, we have to wade through to realize it leads nowhere.
Less ego, more content. Because as it is, it just sounds like a guy trying to sound profound… and failing miserably.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t like long words, but if you read through all of that and STILL couldn’t grasp why I didn’t like it, that’s on you.
Tired riffs sloppily played, incoherent solos, incongruent interludes, and if you read the words “But you can’t just imitate the glory days and expect your own efforts to be as laudable” in
literally the first paragraph and somehow thought I was complaining that it wasn’t old school then nothing I could’ve written would get the point across to you.