| From its fourth song onwards (which is
to say, for half of the album, plus one song), Nihility is
a rice-and-beans masterpiece: death metal staple food that cannot
fail to satisfy any fan of the genre. Especially bracing is the build-up
alluded to above: how often does an album have the confidence to delay
its best moments for after the midway point? Conventional wisdom encourages
artists (or, more often, record label executives) to frontload albums
with hits, resulting in records that start out strong and then die
ugly public deaths. But Nihility metastasizes like a tumor
in the lung, starting off as a slight cough that regularly redoubles
its force with alarming focus and speed, so that by the time you’re
near the end it has become more or less impossible to breathe. The
dogged resistance to blues-based progressions is charming in its staunch
adherence to the basic articles of the death metal creed. It is a
terrific, violent, excitingly great record, and there is very little
novel about it. When I threw it into the boombox and started to get
all worked up about it the other day, I exhumed the press kit from
the Filing Cabinet of Doom; it disagrees with me on the subject of
Decapitated’s originality. |
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