Doom Cult

Oh, why do some people/demons have to vomit a full-length in order to prove that they can be less idiosyncratic, less chaotic, less loud and more boring than on the previous MCD? Here we have the brand new experience offered by Diocletian: more control, more screaming and... screaming provided by the sect colleagues, less colourful drumming, more boring guitar tone.

The compositions are awesomely unidimensional, and while the guitarist is quite competent at his thing, he made me realize a thing. That sometimes metal, and especially black metal, borrows heavily from the silliest sources around. This album, for example, might be a great Flash Gordon revival moment. Just take a song that is associated with a diabolic cartoon character and play it downtuned and distorted, it will succeed. It just gives the feeling that you have heard this before, and it sounds way too intendedly diabolic not to sound like an actor trying to give his best possible impersonation of Emperor Wang. Many black metal songs strive to emulate cartoonish melodic themes, some do it more obviously, some manage to hide it. And to a certain extent (though this is not the best statement in a specific review for a specific album, some people should have realized it a long time ago), this kind of music gets unnervingly pretentious. Even its primitivism relies more on a movie-like hairy creature impression than on aberrations that defy the very essence of humanity, Christendom etc. etc.

The drumming got me stupefied, and left me in a puddle of spleen. This does not stand a chance compared to the greatness on their self-titled MCD, simply because it flows very monotonously, and even the change of the beat flows so naturally that it does not affect the music in any good way. Unlike their first MCD, where the guy could pull dramatic moments seemingly out of nowhere. The vocals have not improved by any means, the vocalists stayed true to the war metal Growl-meet-Shriek formula.

At a global level, the simple comparison drawn between THIS and Blasphemy gets thousand laffz out of my bowels. How the hell could someone compare that unique brand of hallucinated tempo shifts present at Blasphemy with this dragging blastbeat extravaganza? Blasphemy do organized chaos with style. Diocletian do organized chaos with a desolating linear aesthetic.

If you are a war metal freak, you will be probably hunting this down anyway, but those who are not necessarily genre magnets be forewarned. Get some Blasphemy before any other war metal act.

P.S.
1) That ”great” ascending feedback sequence in the beginning of the album sounds horrifyingly close to the opening riff on a track called Sarah from a band named The Caspar Brotzmann Massaker.
2) If you are really interested in chaos, and I do not mean Merzbow, be sure to check out the Mass Hysterism album by Masayuki Takayanagi. That guy owned.