Moribund Manifesto

What I’m evaluating this time is the sixth studio full-length offering of the seasoned Filipino death metal group Pathogen. This recent album release is titled “Moribund Manifesto,” and it was originally unleashed as a digital format record via Poland‘s Old Temple in April of 2022 before the same label pressed a CD and cassette variant of the full-length in May of the same year. Argentina‘s Repugnant Records had also put out a CD version of “Moribund Manifesto” back in July of 2022, and China‘s Thanatology Productions unchained their own CD and digital versions of the album in the same month and year as Repugnant.

Going to the album, “Moribund Manifesto” is an agglomeration of over 40-minute-long onslaught of ruthless energy and sheer old-school death metal annihilation with a productive spin of technicality that goes in hand with Pathogen‘s satisfactory level of songwriting. A tempest of scorching malevolent riffs that is dispatched alongside a raving chunk of flashy shredding, a convulsing bass line, unrelenting drumming, and coated-in-dark guttural snarls are what the listeners will encounter upon giving this opus a spin.

Its drum work was executed in a terrific delivery, with blast beats placed in certain sections where it can properly function, as it courses with virtuous old-school death metal hammering that provides the other instruments with enough spacing for the audiences to actually perceive their definite purpose in the record. The drum department is doing that and keeping the pace of the music while, at the same time, not giving up its barbarous nature.

The guitar section also plays an important role in getting extreme metal aficionados to hook into the materials in this album, as it disperses a colossal array of compounded three-dimensional riffing intertwined with tremolo-picked mania and mundane chord progressions, along with some rampaging guitar solos that feel incredibly intense and striking in the concentrated mix. Most of these riffs are maintained in a mid-pacing motion, but they often shift into a charging pace in multiple portions of the offering to give emphasis to the riffs’ aggression.

Sometimes these riffs even relax and slow down (as it runs unhurried and very bulky in track number 7) to a somewhat death/doom stride where it gives way to the bass and the drum to do their roles and fill in that dingy atmosphere to ignite a nearly concrete sense of doom and misery into the material. The deep and in-anguished-sounding guttural growls inflected by the vocal area ideally go well and enhance the dismal feature of the forbidding music in this record, as it influences the formation of all the other instruments and facets into one vortex of gorgeously malformed old school death metal showpiece.

While the bass line hardly stands out the majority of the time and only barely appears forward, it still does its job of supporting the guitars, and it adds depth to the current and the overall ambience of this studio full-length. The tenebrous production also provides a perfect foil to the offering, as its eerie and raw sound gives the general output of the tunes a stronger and more powerful sensibility in them to utterly deliver a headbanging and fist-pumping album that every old-school death metal enthusiast will take pleasure in listening to.

To conclude, “Moribund Manifesto” is a very pleasurable release and a pleasing record to add to your collection, after my personal favourite Pathogen full-length, which is “Obscure Deathworship.” It’s an utterly punishing and devastating piece of sheer old-school death metal music that recollects death metal’s foundation and presents how to admirably blend the fundamental elements of this genre to bring nostalgia about why it is in the top hierarchy in the subgenre of extreme metal music. Get this if you enjoy archaic death metal that’s straightforward and does not involve any modern mainstream trendy wankery!