FMA Reviews: Devourment: Conceived in Sewage

Originally reviewed here.

Despite my seemingly intellectual exterior, I am a lawyer after all, I love slam death metal. I know it is mostly stupid and juvenile, an excuse for bands to get as brutal as they want with ridiculously filthy lyrics. And even though I admit that it is ridiculous and juvenile, I still can not get enough of it. It is a dichotomy that perplexes me. Some slam bands are surprisingly talented musically with some well-written lyrics, just look at Wormed and Defeated Sanity. But then there are groups like Devourment, who were instrumental in giving slam death metal a formula.

Despite the fact that Devourment had a large deal to do with the inception of slam death metal as a valid subgenre, they themselves have been distancing themselves from the genre in a lot of ways. Their sound is much more rooted in standard brutal death metal these days, and especially since their last album. That does not mean that the slam parts are entirely absent, they can still be heard in a number of places throughout this release, but they are not as important to the structure of each individual song, and there are even some songs that do not appear at all.

Not that all that is out of the way, this is an okay release. It really does not forge any new ground in a genre that is already fairly stale and bereft of anything truly interesting. Devourment certainly make a lot of noise, that is to be expected. You pretty much know what to expect from a Devourment record. It is not going to be pretty. They are going to offend a lot of people ("Legalize Homicide", "Fucked with Rats"). They are going to blast away on the drums, which is kind of impressive time and again, though I would not argue their drummer is incredibly talented, but he is fast. The vocals actually show a little bit of differentiation, with vocalist Mike Majewski alternating between his deep guttural croaks and a higher-pitched more stereotypical death metal roar. The band does actually have some decent riffs on this thing, which is something that they have ignored in the past in an effort to bring in more slam parts.

The production was done by Hate Eternal leader Erik Rutan and actually sounds quite good, which is somewhat rare for Devourment. It is clean enough to clearly hear the vocals and riffs. But it is not so clean that it comes off as sterile.

This is basically a run-of-the-mill brutal death metal release. It is not likely to earn Devourment any new fans, nor is it likely to turn off any old ones. It just sort of exists.