Monstrosity are perhaps more celebrated for their second LP and masterstroke of technical death metal in ‘Millennium’ (1996), but their debut, 1992’s ‘Imperial Doom’ is their most quintessentially death metal offering. Although chiefly remembered today as the album that launched Corpsegrinder upon the world, this album deserves to be celebrated for so much more besides. When using words like “purity” to describe a death metal album we tend to call to mind the blunt directness of Master, or the overt simplicity of Obituary. But death metal is at heart a more complex beast than such distilled violence
There is order in the chaos. And that’s certainly the case for Monstrosity’s first offering, which eschewed the growing regal tendency of a Morbid Angel, the complex jazz of Atheist, or the back to basics thrash of a Massacre. Instead, Monstrosity offer us a perfect brew of bluntness mixed with complexity. Thrash riffs breeze by in wave after wave of violent speed, finding their flow constantly interrupted by choppy, chromatic riffs that mark significant – and frequent – tempo shifts spread across each track.
In short this is something of a hybrid between the more thrash orientated style of the Florida scene and the mechanical hardcore infused sonic blades of Suffocation. The warm Morrisound mix gives it a more organic feeling than the colder offerings coming out of New York and Chicago at the time, but the percussive tendency is highly visible across this album. It finds its closest analogue in Malevolent Creation, who were attempting a similarly broad survey of death metal at the time, combining the fluid, flowing melodic threads that attempt to articulate themselves over the course of an entire piece in spite of the schizophrenic foundations they arise from. This is a hacked up and mutilated approach to song writing, the beginnings of death metal’s early forays into the dense musicality that is known for today.
For my money Monstrosity were more successful at this approach than Malevolent Creation however, knitting the two competing elements of flowing momentum and stilted disorientation into a unified work of multifaceted death metal with a strong sense of forward motion. One can already hear the more technical elements that would later define this artist’s output, most notably in the rhythm section, where intricate basslines resituate the impact of individual guitar riffs, and drums force violent accents onto every transition with bravado. Even the vocals offer a balance of animalistic rage and measured aggression, with lyrics being easily audible, and delivered in creative rhythmic punches which are set alongside the more primal delivery of elongated screams, signifying moments of particular drama. All this makes for a comprehensive and surprisingly layered work of death metal that was sadly overlooked in favour of the more overt steps toward experimentation that Monstrosity’s contemporaries were taking at the time.
The genre’s antecedents are all visible in this album, but they are integrated into a fully matured and sui generis form of extreme metal. One that had not yet taken the next leap forward as many of their contemporaries were attempting to do at the time. An endeavour that would eventually lead to all manner of prefixes deployed to describe the novel sounds buried within new releases: technical, progressive, doom, blackened. But Monstrosity were not backward looking, they were not screaming for a simpler time and begging for us to return to first principles. They offered nuanced and deeply layered works in their own right. For that reason their appeal remains understated, subtle, but no less rewarding as a result.
Originally published at Hate Meditations
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