(We present DGR‘s review of the new album from Italy’s Hideous Divinity in advance of its March 22nd release by Century Media.)
A new Hideous Divinity album will loom large in the distance. We’re now well into the group’s career as a generator of overwhelming and unrelenting death metal, for those who might think that standing at the bottom of a mountain while a crew does avalanche preparation during snow season is a fun way to experience music.
Hideous Divinity started with the intensity of their music ratcheted way past the standard red line and have effectively stayed there. Somehow, with each album, they’ve found new ways to twist and mutate that intensity into something different and malformed every time, often with enough there to make those releases a different experience from one another.
Yet for just as much as the band play mad scientist with their musical compositions there’s still the theme of whether or not their vocalist or their drummer is going to pass out from exhaustion first as the group continually push themselves harder and harder.
Unextinct marks the group’s fifth album. They’ve drawn from a big pool of subject matter over the years but have never been shy about a deep love for films and drawing from the thematic overtones of certain movies. It just wasn’t until the Adveniens/Simulacrum pairing that this was made truly obvious, and by the time the LV-426 EP was released, Hideous Divinity were effectively hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer with it. Both musically and thematically, Unextinct is no different – but also with Unextinct, it seems that Hideous Divinity have found a taste for attempting to be musically cinematic as well.
Hideous Divinity rose out of the wave of Italian death metal groups – and musical circles, given the shared lineups between them at one point or another – based almost entirely around the initial impression of the band being ‘holy shit that’s fast’, effectively picking up the ‘death metal as extreme sport’ baton and running with it a la Forrest Gump straight out of the arena. Often it wasn’t so much the whole band that was doing it as it was just how much the drummer could’ve been doing their best impression of a recording of a Browning machine gun.
After that sunk in, only then did it settle that everyone in the group was playing at that level. Hideous Divinity, however, never really made a grab for the melodic side of things – favoring the ideal of overwhelming the listener at all turns and transforming themselves into a musical three hundred foot wall. Hideous Divinity albums will leave a listener flattened.
For their fifth album though, one glance at the tracklist shows some interesting musical choices in play. You’ll note that there’s a small handful of tracks hovering around the one and a half to two and a half minute mark and others soaring well into the six and eight minute range. Generally speaking, Hideous Divinity‘s persistence at being four billion RPM has resulted in some dense five minute blocks, one after the other. The cinderblocks fired out of a cannon approach. On Unextinct they have some noticeable peaks and valleys – within both the songs themselves and the more obvious shorter tracks that they use to build up to the next big ‘epic’ number, or the more deftly used sweeping of the table of previous servings.
Some of those shorter numbers are your classic ‘Hideous Divinity lays Earth to waste’ and others do in fact segue into the much bigger numbers. It keeps Unextinct far more interesting than what you might expect. Simulacrum was like being hurtled through an increasingly dark and apocalyptic world and Adveniens before it was the auditory equivelant of rocking out to the sound of a blast furnace. Unextinct plays out a fair bit like a soundtrack by comparison.
The longer numbers on Unextinct are very intricate this go-around. Granted, on previous albums they’ve been that way as well but there’s been a fair amount of Hideous Divinity‘s ‘everything all at once’ methodology crushing that ideal to dust. It would only be on the sixth or seventh listen that you’d note just how much they’re pumping into a song to keep things on the rails.
Hideous Divinity intertwine a lot of the music together and you’d be forgiven at first for assuming that the opening blast of songs was all one big, suffocating number. “Dust Settles On Humanity” could flatten someone on its own for the minute or so of music within it and Hideous Divinity use it as an opener for what has been one of the lead-off singles for the album, “The Numinous One”. That near-eight-minute run time is not a joke; it’s a gigantic song and one of a few of that size in the overall Unextinct sphere of influence. “Atto quarto, the Horror Paradox” sails well into the eight-plus-minute range and the band are playing for every second of it. They both have their fair share of atmospheric moments within them and “Atto Quarto” includes a notable breather, but you can rest assured, there will always be something there and because it is Hideous Divinity, that presence will be noticeable.
That cinematic focus is most present in the back half and leads to what is one of the album’s grander highlights: the combination of “Hair, Dirt, Mud” into “More Than Many, Never One”. The changeover between the two is stark enough that they’re two distinct songs, but taken in one big block – where you eventually reach the single from last year “Mysterium Tremendum” – you get a taste of the rhythm section absolutely dominating a song.
“Hair, Dirt, Mud” suffocates on its own with an opening crawl into wider conflagration and “More Than Many, Never One” is piston-fired front to back. It’s a familiar intensity but one that plays perfectly within the confines of its placing in the back part of the disc after the initial few musical mountains have been climbed. While Unextinct settles into a familiar ‘short song/long song’ format in its back half, the shifting moods and musical shades are appreciated as it highlights more of the group’s overall sound rather than being like musically stopping an out of control semi with your face.
Ranking a Hideous Divinity album against its peers is a bit of a pointless exercise, as the band have been very well-settled into their groove of ‘group suffocates all’ for three albums now. While they’ve enjoyed a gloriously disgusting bass guitar tone – highlighted in “Chestburst” from the previous EP – the adventure of a Hideous Divinity album had often been rooted in how much the band contorted their sound to be not just ‘the same, but again’. Unextinct, however, does make a markedly good impression just based on the fact that Hideous Divinity have gotten really fucking close to creating their own demented soundtrack and atmospheric work.
There’s plenty of getting mowed-down over and over within the new album’s boundaries, yet on that same thread, there are times where it does feel more ‘earned’ than it has before. It’s impressive how the group continue to draw from the dark well of inspiration that they do and Unextinct notches a good amount of highlight songs onto the band’s musical scoreboard.
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