Colorado’s Execration aren’t doing anything particularity innovative or new within death metal on their sophomore album, but they do death metal pretty well and add a little resin driven intellectual brutality to their standard US death metal throes.
With a sound I can only term as “Colorado-ish” there’s some Cephalic Carnage complexity (especially vocally) and hydo powered savagery going on here that gives the band a little character, especially as the band veers away from the typical themes of Zombie tits and rotting stuff instead going with slightly more off topic themes like ” The Stars Will Make Known My Rage”, “Further Through the Portal” and “Serpentine Changeling”. Still, the band’s sound is pretty typical USDM mixing brutality with a dash on technical death metal forming a pretty chaotic album that will probably get lost in the shuffle of 2012 releases.
The Acceptance of Zero Existence plays like polished tech death metal (i.e Decrepit Birth) played a bead curtain, bong filled room full of black light posters, red eyes, dreads and bean bag chairs- it’s got a loose, slurred, hazy feel to its complexity that might make more sense under the influence of a certain narcotic, that would reveal its true depth. However, listening to the album stone cold sober, the album seems to lack a bit of cohesion and clarity, which I think is intended.
The almost structureless noise, layered vocals and mix of bottom end bass and echo-y shrill riffs of “The Queen of Wolves ” and closer ‘The First Death” or interestingly paced “The Great Fall” (is that a sweep arpeggio?) have a certain level of mind bending, brutal complexity I can appreciate, but I have a hard time giving the album my full attention, and I don’t think the album wants my full attention unless in some altered state. Three spacey instrumentals throughout the album seem to enforce this, as they seem a bit out of place amid the chaos, but I can see them making sense in some sort of trance like state. Yeah- I mean high.
In short- a solid death metal album that’s a little bit out of the box while still having plenty of death metal tropes. If these guys really honed in on their cosmic, other worldly element and tightened up their sound, they might be onto something here.
