Hey there tech fiends, it's that time of the week again. Before we dive into today's focus, here's the usual reminder that if you're looking for more sick music, all prior editions of this series can be perused here.
Decrescent hail from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and on their recently released 2018 debut album, Blackened Bequest, the band plays an interesting take on tech-death whose sound strongly reminds me of Vale of Pnath, Arsis, and Allegaeon. Leading to a hyper-charged technical melodic death metal style delivered with a pronounced, and unique for this style, blackened touch everpresent in each song. Outside of that base framework, Decrescent’s music is paired with a strong progressive death metal influence and also an ample amount of brutal minded riffing woven in. Those two narrower parts of their identity take on a mix of smaller and larger roles depending on the song. Which helps add a lot of variety to the album while allowing Decrescent to retain an overall uniform well-developed technical melodic death metal sound at the same time.
Blackened Bequest also often reminds me of Inferi and Enfold Darkness spliced with The Black Dahlia Murder riffs blending with influences from Decrepit Birth, Necrophagist, The Faceless, and Deeds of Flesh further spicing up the musical variety. The group’s interesting mixture of influences could also be sonically compared to the hybridized style of Irreversible Mechanism as well. A lot of groups doing the technical melodic death metal style tend to bore me or deliver releases that are competent yet unmemorable. Blackened Bequest does everything right and never drops the ball with lackluster material or one-dimensional songwriting at any point.
This album is an explosive assault from start to finish, from the strong songwriting to the endless flow of killer riffs and leads, to the expertly executed emphasis on hooks and melody, every facet of this record is absolutely top-notch and well done. Blackened Bequest nails down the perfect split between consistency and variety that so many groups fail to reach in order to craft a truly excellent tech-death album. By that, I mean Blackened Bequest has its own identity but does so without losing quality due to featuring too many songs that all operate the same way, an issue that plagues many albums and newcomers to the genre. Be sure to follow the group over on the Decrescent Facebook page.
