Let me just state for the record that I love technical death metal...give me massive, twisting riffs, jazz-fusion influenced bass lines & lead guitar solos, flailing drum work & blast beats, menacing vocals, and complex, progressive song structures any day of the week and I'm a happy camper. Passages Into Deformity has a lot to like for myself and fans of this sort of thing, as Germany's Defeated Sanity look to take things to places even more extreme than on their previous efforts.
For the most part, I'm on board, as this platter is filled with intense riffing, acrobatic drum work, killer lead bass & guitar lines, and some absolutely pulverizing arragements, like on the brutal "Verblendung". It's when the band tries to be too brutal and too technical at the same time that the album tends to fail. Tracks like "Verses Of Deformity" and "Naraka" have some good moments, and some really slow, grinding breakdown dirges, but the manic blasting mixed with overly technical and sometimes noises passages just come across as unfocused and disjointed in spots. In addition, I'm just not feeling the growls & grunts here. They just don't add anything to these tunes, and are so low and incomprehensible that they become a distraction.
Bad vocals and a lack of direction on some songs aside, there are some crushing tunes on Passages Into Deformity that feature some blazing, jaw dropping instrumentation. While these guys aren't yet in the same league as Suffocation, Obscura, Spawn of Possession, and Nile, you'll definitely want to keep an eye on them.
Track Listing
1.
Initiation
2.
Naraka
3.
Verblendung
4.
Lusting For Transcendence
5.
The Purging
6.
Verses Of Deformity
7.
Perspectives
8.
Frenzy
9.
Martyrium
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