Album Review: Decapitated - Blood Mantra

Most people wouldn't know it by looking at me, but half of my heritage comes from Poland. Knowing that fact, you might think that I would taken at least a passing interest in the music scene from that country, but that isn't the least bit true. Poland has not been a leading exporter of music I would want to listen to, but the fact that Decapitated comes from one of my ancestral homelands is enough to at least pique my curiosity.

Decapitated plays a brand of technical death metal, which is a style that doesn't make much sense to me. Death metal started out as a more ferocious brand of thrash, music that was supposed to be as dirty and disgusting as humanly possible. But over the years, as technical death metal has evolved, it is something else entirely. Technical death metal is a shiny, well-honed, smoothed out package that is as far away from its roots as is possible, without abandoning the tenets of death metal. Virtuoso playing? Polished production? That doesn't sound like the death metal I remember.

The first thing I notice about this album is that like most technical death metal, the sound is so polished and precise that the guitars come across as having less grit than on most mainstream rock records. They are so tightly wound that the riffs don't sound nearly as heavy as the low tuning would indicate. The tone does heighten the mechanical feeling of the music, but it does so at the expense of what it means to be death metal. It's not a new complaint, by any means, but it's one that still holds true here.

“Exiled In Flesh” is an odd opening track, with a long section of tremolo picked riffs delaying the onset of the proper song, which is then over with before it feels like it has a chance to get going. And once it does, the riffing is off-kilter, a jarring bit of playing that almost feels like it's being played in the wrong time signature. That kind of riffing is Decapitated's stock-in-trade, popping up throughout the album. They love to play riffs that veer off course at odd times, keeping you off balance. That might be interesting from the perspective of breaking it down with music theory and time grids, but it is frustrating to listen to. My mind is never given the payoff I'm expecting, so rather than being able to feel like I'm a part of what I'm hearing, I'm reduced to a spectator at an event I can barely understand.

When it comes down to it, “Blood Mantra” is an album I think is torn between two worlds. The music wants to be both crushing death metal and intricately advanced. I'm not sure those two things can be balanced well enough for them to both be given the spotlight. Listening to the album, the songs bounce from one to the other, rarely integrating the two sounds into a cohesive whole. There are moments, like the title track, where the familiar roar of death metal is felt, but at other times there is little besides the vocals to remind me that I'm not listening to a more progressive (or even djent) record.

After listening to this album, I'm not sure I'm any closer to understanding technical death metal, nor am I any more sure that it can be done to the proper effect. “Blood Mantra” is interesting, from a musical standpoint, but it doesn't come together as an album of great songs. It's very much a guitar player's record, which is fine, but I expect more from the music I listen to, and I didn't get it here. Then again, I'm not impressed by how many notes someone can play in an odd time signature, so I was never the target audience to begin with.