Morbid Angel - Illud Divinum Insanus [Seasons of Mist - 2011]Well here I am with the new Morbid Angel album…cause for celebration one would think, David Vincent is back on board after 15 years away from the band, it’s their first recording in eight years and, well, its Morbid Angel, for the legions of death metal fans out there, they are one of the true legends and stalwarts of the scene. More is the pity then that ‘Illud Divinum Insanus’ turns out to be such a massive disappointment. As many fans would have heard in interviews with guitarist Trey Azagthoth in the time approaching the release of this album, Trey was talking about how he was listening to a lot of hardcore techno and was intent on bringing in that influence to the Morbid Angel sound…OK, I thought, great stuff, I have long been an advocate of mixing these two genres of extreme music. Armies of Morbid Angel fans were up in arms from the off, before a single track was even released, but I was all for them evolving their sound and mixing things up a bit…at the end of the day, this is Morbid Angel we are talking about, they can’t go far wrong surely?…
On the first spin of the album I actually laughed hard. Very hard. Then I panicked realising that I would actually have to REVIEW this abomination without sounding too harsh…so I tried to approach it objectively, putting aside my lifelong love of all things Morbid Angel and just looking on it as a band trying out new things and experimenting with their sound.
The truth is I just could not find anything redeeming about it at all. After the far too pompous intro is over with, the opening track proper, ‘Too Extreme!’ lumbers forth. As I said earlier, I am all for mixing hardcore with death metal, but the problem is that the kicks sound horribly out-dated, the whole mix of the track is horrendous and soulless, the track itself just plods on ad infinitum, going absolutely nowhere and add to that David Vincent’s absolutely ridiculous lyrics...too extreme? There is nothing extreme about this whatsoever!
After the first track is out of the way, the album takes on familiar territory, brutal and technical death metal…again though it is nothing but mediocre, if you did not know it was Morbid Angel it would go in one ear and out of the other, there is nothing distinguishing about it or indeed entertaining. ‘Existo Vulgoré’ and Blades for Baal’ both carry on in this fashion and then we have the utterly ridiculous ‘I am Morbid’, mixing up nu-metal esque riffage, with more embarrassing lyrical content. The name alone says it all really. ’10 More Dead’ is, in my opinion, probably the best track on the album and it in itself is nothing special, just bearable. After that the rest of the album just falls down the toilet. The inane collaboration with Combichrist on the ‘Destructos VS the Earth / Attack’ track, which yields results akin to a poor man’s Rammstein on a really bad day, followed by more mediocre album filler with ‘Nevermore’ and ‘Beauty Meets Beast’ (what the hell were they thinking with these album titles!?).
None of this though prepares you for the final two tracks on the album. ‘Radikult’ makes MA come across as a band trying far too hard to appeal to the masses, starting with a really, really bad drum machine loop, before dropping into a track which tries to take nu-metal sensibilities and mixes them up with a very simple industrial stomp fest. Suffice to say it does not work, in fact it’s quite cringe worthy. The final track makes an attempt at mixing in speedcore, but again the whole track is completely soulless and there is no power put forward at all, by this point though you probably would have zoned out completely or be in side splitting hysterics.
The problem with this entire album is it just sounds like Morbid Angel has no idea as to what direction to go in and have just ended up with a very confused mess as a result. The ideas they have tried to incorporate sound so out-dated and everything is so soulless and lazy that it just cannot be taken seriously at all. I really, really hope this is just an experiment gone awry and not the path they are going to go down in the future. 1 out of 5 (that’s just for the ’10 more Dead’ track and nothing more!)
Todd Robinson
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