Kingdom of Corpses

Have you heard pretty much any other semi-technical brutal death metal album in the vein of Unique Leader's roster? Then you've got no reason to even think of Lust of Decay's 'Kingdom of Corpses', which so eagerly clings to the trappings of its genre without offering any reason to come back to it over other similar albums that it's hard to see any reason for it to exist. I mean, even the cover art and the song titles are your bog standard brutal death metal tripe. 'Septic Tank Abortion', 'Oral Asphyxiation', 'Arachnid Anal Infestation'-- I swear I've seen every one of these in the track listings of a Gorgasm or a Lividity record.

Bearing in mind the cover art and the song titles, I went into this album expecting exactly what I got: brutal death metal with a dash of technicality, following in the tradition of Disavowed and Gorgasm but with none of the memorability and staying power that makes those bands worth listening to. It's not unpleasant to listen to, I guess, but most of it goes through one ear and out the other in a shapeless haze of technical exercises in fretboard wizardry and rapid-fire tremolo runs, leaving no particular impression other than 'jeez, I'm only two minutes into this song and I feel like I've listened to the entire album'. Halfway through the album, my ears perked up, and I realised in awe that Lust of Decay were playing a riff, an honest to god riff, something that can actually linger in your mind and give you a reason to come back to it-- and then I realised, wait, this is a Deicide song. Sure enough, the one song where Lust of Decay bothers to play something resembling a riff happens to be a cover of an old school death metal song.

That being said, the album becomes infinitely more worth listening to when Lust of Decay gives it a rest on the endless stream of tremolo and technical runs and starts chugging. Many of these songs feature one or two surprisingly effective grooves, sandwiched in between the boring semi-technical stuff, though they really don't make it worth wading through the rest of the album to get to them-- after all, there are plenty of bands like Disgorge and Pyaemia that intersperse grooves in between technical riffs that are actually worth listening to and coming back to. Still, I can't help but feel that if Lust of Decay structured their songs more around the grooves and let the other riffs act in a diminished capacity as filler building up to the grooves-- that's about all they're worth-- they might produce something that gives the listener a reason to reach for it over the countless other technical brutal death metal albums in this style.

Individual performances are certainly very proficient; the bassist gets an opportunity to shine every now and again, particularly in Cranial Incubation and Cognitive Decimation. Hell, the drummer provides some surprisingly varied beats during the groovier sections, although outside of those moments he mostly operates in the standard blasting-and-double-bass modes of brutal death metal drumming. The only individual performance which is actively grating is the vocalist, who, granted, isn't unique or unusual as brutal death metal vocalists go; there's just something about his delivery that I can't stand.

Long story short, in everything from aesthetic to lyrical content to the music itself, Kingdom of Corpses is a pastiche of every other post-2000 semi-technical brutal death metal band you've ever heard, and in a sense it's sort of emblematic of the problems technical brutal death metal these days suffers from: it's riffless, one-dimensional, and content to remain nothing more than 'okay' without doing a thing to distinguish itself. Not worth listening to in the slightest.