Modern Death Metal is a quickly vanishing subgenre. With so many offshoots veering off and melding with other genres, as well as the rampant advance of the -core influence, the mid 2000s death metal bands pushing for aggressive yet modern sounding records is a diminishing number. With the renewal of the Old School Death Metal sound in recent years, more bands are opting to go for that aesthetic, further pushing straightforward death metal adapted to modern sensibilities to the wayside.
The duo of Italian death metal giants has always championed the modern death metal sound: Fleshgod Apocalypse opting for the more theatric approach with their symphonic technical death metal, and Hour of Penance with their more straightforward bludgeoning. Later, Hideous Divinity emerged and attempted to bridge the divide between the two aforementioned divide. They released a brand-new record as well, which has been favorably reviewed here.
After 2019’s stellar record Misotheism was among my highest rated record (reviewed here), they seem to have gotten lost in the void of the pandemic world. With virtually no news after that record about new material, I began to fear that the band had past their hay day. Thankfully, when they announced their newest record Devotion, I was chomping at the bit to get right back into the blasphemous action.
Admittedly, I have been an Hour of Penance fan for several years; with my first experience being the brutally technical record The Vile Conception in the early 2000s, it wasn’t till Paradogma where they really began to settle into their anti-christian technical death metal aesthetic. I began to despair that I had outgrown their sound as both Regicide and Cast The First Stone did not move me in any significant way. But Misotheism brought me right back in!
So how does Devotion stack up to the high standards set up by the previous record?
It’s clear from the album opener and released single “Devotion For Tyranny” that Hour of Penance hasn’t lost their energy or penchant for writing high-intensity technical yet punchy modern death metal. There is plenty of menace on this record too, with the ethereal chanting toward the end of “Parasitic Chain of Command” underlining the brutal riffs, and the opening riff of “Birthright Abolished” harkening back to The Vile Conception in its texture. “Retaliate” gets sludgier in its songwriting, almost sounding like modern Cannibal Corpse in its opening moments. In contrast, “Breathe The Dust of Their Dead” has a main riff that is as catchy as it is jagged and reminds me of the now-defunct Svart Crown with its fretboard jumping tremolo picked insanity. The sheer ferocity and mania in the guitar solos and riffs on the track grabs you by the jugular and does not let go for its entire length.
Here’s the rub. Hour of Penance has always been at deepest odds with production, and sadly Devotion feels like a step back. Especially when compared to Misotheism where it definitely seemed that they had gotten so close to figuring out how to craft a mix for them that was crushing in intensity yet did not compromise on clarity. One of my biggest complaints with Sedition and the next two albums was that the mix/production was squashed into oblivion, compressing any kind of dynamics into this soggy messy chunk.
While Devotion does not feel as bad as Sedition, every technical element outside of the actual songwriting seems to be holding the record back from greatness. The guitar tones seem muddy and hollow, which is particularly damning in the lower register where the band does most of its riffing. The low end of the guitars, along with the bass and the drums seem to be fighting for room to breathe in the same frequency space, and the result is this rumbly mumbly mess which neither sounds raw (as championed by the new wave of OSDM) or the crisp near synthetic sound of modern technical death metal. The moments of the record where the guitars are played in solo without the other instruments as heralds for the next arrangement is a perfect example of the baffling choices made in the studio. The “raw guitar tones” do not sound appetizing to ears even as abused by extreme metal as mine. Understandably, this genre is notoriously complicated to mix and get right to let all the instruments and layers breathe to allow the listener actually enjoy the complexity and intensity of the songwriting, without feeling fatigued by the cacophony of it all. The vocals also stubbornly remain in the same narrow range of the barked growl, which gets quickly filtered out without variety or many hooks. One of the largest drawbacks of the genre is when the vocals become so percussive that they meld into the background static, and Hour of Penance pleads guilty to that sin.
In particular, the latter half of the record quickly began to filter itself out as Red Mist White Noise background noise, rather than coherent enjoyable death metal. This is a damn shame because there are fun ideas on tracks like “Severance”, “The Ravenous Heralds”, “Spiraling Into Decline” and others. But the mix and the unrelenting sonic molasses that we are forced to wade through was so incredibly fatiguing that my brain simply couldn’t pick up individual ideas to focus on and save into memory, the building blocks of creating earworms. Devotion is not one of those records that can be enjoyed from start to finish and would be better served by consuming it on a track-by-track basis, which takes away much of the journey that we enjoy as fans of the genre.
Devotion has the potential to be a great record but is sadly held back by vexing production choices, taking away much of the enjoyment while listening to the record. Hour of Penance continues to take one step forward and two steps back while looking for a way to properly deliver their admittedly solid songwriting ideas into a package that can be palatable to the listening masses.
-
Overall Sound5/10 NeutralDevotion has the potential to be a great record but is sadly held back by vexing production choices, taking away much of the enjoyment while listening to the record.
-
Songwriting & Lyrics7/10 GoodHour of Penance continues to take one step forward and two steps back while looking for a way to properly deliver their admittedly solid songwriting ideas into a package that can be palatable to the listening masses.