Demigod

Demigod by Behemoth is by most means a death metal album as pure as it can be. With much more dissonant guitar works than on the previous records, even more complex and faster drumming and quadruple-layered vocals, this album is being pretty obvious on its message.

That is: showing off. Really, there is not much more to say concerning the actual substance of this record. It is still a matter of personal preference to criticize the decision of layering the vocals so heavily often you can't understand the lyrics even if you know them (as in death metal that is only of semi-importance), but the subtle message of this is an abundance of any kind of thought on what this album is trying to present apart from technical showing off.

While its predecessor Zos Kia Cultus at least tried to build up momentum in adding atmospheric skits and leaving room within the songs for melodic passages to switch with the brutal chugging and blasts, on this album it is limited to a minimum. Songs like Conquer All and Slaves Shall Serve are precisely still that popular because they show off creativity and melodic space within a slaughterfest of blast beats being accompanied with the most dissonant power chord sections imaginable.

It is by no means generally unrecommended to not hit the breaks on a death metal album and blast through it with full speed, such as records like Hour of Penance's The Vile Conception have shown fabulously, but you got to distinguish the songs by more than existing or non-existing steel guitar interludes. The whole midsection of this record is a mesh of continuous blast beats, hammer blasts, hyper speed chugs and a general atonal attitude with a melodic conclusion or pay-off that waits until Xul is played and at least provides a decent solo that is reminiscent of their work of their past two records ... until also this one fades out into an unending tornado of hammer blasts and repetitive down-A chugging. That said, the songs for themselves aren't total failures, but their arrangement in the tracklist makes the listening experience quite monotone and it gets boring pretty quickly

Another point of criticism is the production. Yes, from a discographic point of view, there is an evolution from their past record Zos Kia Cultus. A bad evolution. This album manages to sound even more dry than the previous one, with drums sounding so unnatural one might just well assume the band used a drum computer to record. The guitars are a muddy mesh and on the fast sections it is a challenge to hear out the arrangements. Meanwhile the bass is pretty inaudible. This is of course not uncommon for a death metal album but it is still a letdown considering how past records dealt with this.

And after all yes, Demigod tries to be a textbook brutal death metal album. And in all respect it should be dealt as such. The biggest problem for me listening to the album is the absence of thought. As pointed out in numerous other reviews there is a strong lean to Nile, the problem being that Behemoth sort of don't really know what to do with this inspirational input. Most of the time the melodic passages go nowhere and the songs lose themselves within their levels of brutality, leaving behind an image of a band that is still undecided about their favored direction.