Horrifying Hallucinations of Ungodly Activities

It's been a very long while since I've listened to a brutal death metal band who gave a negative amount of fucks comparable to that which Secreted Entity give. You can practically feel it in their music, how the band members probably got done recording this album and immediately went off to flash their genitalia to children inside a local orphanage or punched their fist through their neighbor's car windshield. Horrifying Hallucinations of Ungodly Activities is thirty minutes of fun, reckless brutality that simply does not give a shit about you or anything else in life, and the end result is delicious.

The best comparison I can make for Secreted Entity's overall sound is that it sounds like a Putrefaction in Progress clone's interpretation of brutal death metal. Of particular note are the blast beats, which occur at planned and precise points of the song in a compositional sense but go completely batshit insane from there, barely keeping time with the riffs and playing so fast that at times it becomes hard to distinguish individual drum beats. The drum beats, in turn, are helped along by the general tone of the drumkit, which is trashy as all fuuuuuuck. The snare does not click, or snap: it fucking twangs. It's loud, bassy, and spacious without being intrusive upon the rest of the mix, and in this way it is a role model for slam death metal snares everywhere. The cymbals are pretty typical, and I guess the kick drums are a bit too clicky, but HOLY SHIT that snare tone is amazing and when your snare sounds like Secreted Entity's no one gives a shit about what the rest of your kit sounds like. The drumming here is pretty tight and technical as far as slam goes, but the entire presentation is so goddamn noisy that you'll never be able to fully appreciate it. That's the real magic of Horrifying Hallucinations of Ungodly Activities: it joins the ranks of Perverse Recollections of a Necromangler and Suffocated and Embalmed as another brutal death metal album which comes across as totally unrestrained, dissonant, unfiltered and practically improvised on the spot in regards to composition. As with the other two aforementioned albums, the end result is an album which feels a lot more brutal than your average everyday slam band, with a fair bit of chaos thrown in for good measure.

Secreted Entity are generally faster than a lot of other slam bands - even when they're not assaulting your face with a blast section that practically borders on gorenoise, their slams are fast and groovy as fuck. The band stay within 4/4 time pretty much all the time while slamming, and don't use all that many pinch harmonics (which is a shame, because they use them very nicely), but make up for it by never devolving into those sort of sparse, empty-feeling slams with short rests between the chugs - Secreted Entity either bounce or they crush, and everything else is deemed to be "not brutal enough" and discarded. In another wise decision, the band eschew rhythmic triplet patterns with their kick pedals in favor of raping the shit out of them at all times, with a near-constant flow of double bass dominating the music during both the blasts and the slams. Though the band don't use them particularly often compared to most other brutal death metal bands, Secreted Entity obviously understand exactly how a slam is supposed to work and apply their knowledge to every single chugging section present on the album. If Horrifying Hallucinations of Ungodly Activities were composed entirely of slams, it'd probably be damn near Cephalotripsy or Epicardiectomy in terms of quality.

But it's not made entirely of slams, and I'm thankful for that, because Secreted Entity are brilliant riffcrafters as well. The riffs are not only varied (you've got your Suicide Silence style of 'roided-up deathcore riffs, which is usually what BDM bands opt for when they decide to get riffy; there are also sections comprised of technical noodling on the lower strings, comparable to Defeated Sanity, and quick flourishes on the higher strings which are reminiscent of Brain Drill), but they get the job done, which is a lot more than can be said for your average BDM band. Rather than acting as filler that the band tries to plow through so they have a reason to go into slam mode again, the riffs here are memorable and help to distinguish the songs from one another. Even if you think brutal death metal is ewwwww grooosssss, you'll...well, you'll still probably hate this album because it's certainly not the type to patronize to people who can't handle a little bit of mindless brutality, but even if you're that guy, riffs like 1:49 in "Handled" and 0:28 in "Subconscious Defilement" are going to stick with you for quite a while. Hell, there's even melodies embedded in all the slams to distinguish them from one another, and Secreted Entity even manage to make those sound nice without turning them into cheesy nonsense.

Now, Horrifying Hallucinations of Ungodly Activities is great and all, but much to my dismay it is not an album I could describe as perfect. The weakest link here is probably the vocalist - this feels like a band in which a more sonically present vocalist would benefit the music greatly, but the vocal performance here is a weak and shriveled squeal which is all too easy to ignore. What with the madness soaring around them, I feel that the vocals need a bit more strength to separate them from the rest of the mess here. My second complaint would be that the guitar tone is a bit weird - it's not particularly thick and is just a bit too raw and treble-filled for my tastes, and a bit more bass backing it up certainly wouldn't hurt the awesomely trashy vibe that Secreted Entity has going on.

Actually, disregard those two complaints above because they have no real weight when compared to how ridiculously awesome Horrifying Hallucinations of Ungodly Activities is. If you like messy brutal death metal like Pencil Lead Syringe or Enmity, you should buy this album because Secreted Entity's debut is decidedly hella tight, and plus there's a guy with a fucking minigun for an arm on the album cover. Case closed.