Artist: Reptilian Death
Album: The Dawn of Consummation and Emergence
Label: Demonstealer Records
Mastered and Mixed by: Sahil Makhija
Release Date: June, 2013
What started as a simple Death Metal side project in 2001, has now turned into one of the most élite supergroups of the country; a group that consists of India’s two most recognized extreme metal musicians, Sahil Makhija (Demonic Resurrection) and Vinay Venkatesh (Bhayanak Maut). Reptilian Death was initially, according to Sahil, his outlet to play drums, write some death metal stuff and have fun; but then he decided to take a step ahead and turn this into something big, something more brutal. And so it does!
Today, in this booming metal scene of our country, I observe a torrent of death metal bands just appearing in every corner from North to South but frankly speaking, most of them don’t seem to be very appealing probably because of the adulteration of the sound and lack of innovativeness. This is where Reptilian Death exceeds others, especially with its latest grind, ‘The Dawn of Consummation and Emergence’, which by the way has an awesome cover art by Michal ‘Xaay’ Loranc, summing up all the brutality and bestiality of Reptilian Death in one killer illustration.
Musically, the album offers us twelve amazing tracks of pure viciousness and savagery, containing some mindboggling heavy riffs along with Vinay’s beasty vocals, which have been really phenomenal throughout the album. The album pierces into its 40 minutes long madness with a sorcerous, sort of murky track, titled as ‘PrimEvil’. The song flows nicely in a gloomy atmosphere with a nice amount of suspense building that leads us right to where the craziness begins. We can witness a lot of thrashy elements in the records, especially in the tracks, ‘Inchoate’, ‘Soaked With The Imperfections Of Puerile Blood’, ‘Unnervingly Perverted At The Altar’ and ‘Emerge, Hatred, Emerge’, which are just bursting of mosh-prone riffs and blastbeats, the qualities which any cult death metal fan would kill for. The crafting of these tracks is absolutely fantastic, right from drum tracks to Vinay’s grunt to the lyrics. They are surely among the best in the album.
One can also notice the heavy influence of Demonic Resurrection’s sound in the album, which is quite obvious because of the same brain working behind the music. These tracks, ‘Stimulate Hike Impel Tear’, ‘Distorted By Bondage Blood And Bestiality’ and ‘O’, are pretty innovative as they wonderfully set a dark black metal-ish ambience on these death metal tracks with piercing tremolo-picked progressions and speedy kick drums. The drum lines on the album have been constructed and embedded perfectly on the songs. A good death metal drummer is expected to be fast and to come up with marvellous drum lines that amplify the sensation of the song, a job so nicely done by Demonstealer.
Vinay’s vocal performance has been really good and I certainly believe it to be the highlight of the album. Not only has he developed a tremendous voice texture, he has also done a very good job in vocal delivery. In tracks like ‘Now You Graze Upon Me’, ‘Marvellous Gods – The Apple of My Eye’ and ‘Inchoate’, one can feel the austereness and power of his vocals, totally chilling our spines. The album ends agreeably with the track, ‘Emergence – The World, Your Playground’ with a perfectly balanced track. The song has various section; it kicks off with a high tempo paced riff, flows into a section of blastbeats and ends with a beautiful melodic solo by Daniel Kenneth Rego; indeed turning out to be a good composition.
The work on guitars is pretty remarkable and mature and clearly reflects the amount of experience Sahil has gained over the years. The riffs are welded together with apt bridges and the quality of composition is also pretty good in most of the tracks, while being reasonably satisfactory in the rest. Coming to the production of the album, it is quite decent. The tracking of vocals and guitars has been fairly good but the drum tracks lack dynamics and are pretty feeble due lack of tone. Also the patch selected for guitar is rather weak, dearth of the general amount of power, we generally witness in a death metal record.
Sans the minor negative points, the album is pretty amazing and is definitely a recommendation for the heavy listeners.
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‘O’ Lyric Video:
