AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DISPLAY OF DECAY — “VITRIOL”

This makes the fourth time we’ve premiered music from the Edmonton-based death metal band Display of Decay since 2014. The last time, in 2018, we began this way:

If you imagine Display of Decay as a big rocketing road machine with a roaring jet engine in place of the usual pumping cylinders (and that’s not hard to imagine at all), the brakes obviously failed a few hundred miles ago, to the vicious glee of the blood-lusting demons at the controls. When you listen to their new album, Art In Mutilation, it’s patently obvious that they’re having a howling good time, and their full-throttle, take-no-prisoners enthusiasm is highly contagious.

Five years later, Display of Decay are finally following up Art In Mutilation with a new album (their fourth full-length) named Vitriol, which will be released by Gore House Productions on October 20th. The album title alone suggests that the band’s music is no less bloodthirsty than it was before. If anything, they’ve doubled-down on the slaughtering — but not at the cost of what makes their music simultaneously so damned contagious.

L-R: Brandon Siefert (Bass), Sean Watson (Guitar/Vocals), Logan Wilson (Drums)

The band make very clear up-front about what inspired them this time: “The album Vitriol was born of rage and spite fueled further by the chaos and uncertainty felt worldwide over the last few years.” They also make that clear with the very first song.

Lyrically, the opener “Malicious Motorcide” is (in the band’s words) “about driving over hordes of people in a fit of rage”. Of course it’s far better to exorcise that impulse through music than to actually do it, but as exorcisms go, the song leaves nothing to chance.

With monstrous gutturals and crazed howls expelling the words, the music integrates sounds of jolting punishment and frenzied madness. The riffing whirs and whines, darts and cuts like a big circle saw while the bass thunders and the drumming chops like an ax. The fretwork and percussive patterns turn on a dime, along with the tempos, until everything convulses in a spasm of berserk violence.

After that exhilarating opener Display of Decay tear through seven more tracks, with a total running time for Vitriol of 29 1/2 minutes. The ensuing lyrical content varies. some of it based on violent video games, some of it based on gruesome real-world killers or mass shootings (and mass-media’s obsession with covering the tragedies for clicks, and thereby perhaps helping to spawn copycats).

For those interested in learning more about the lyrical themes and how the band chose to fashion the underlying music, we’ve included their own track-by-track commentary at the end of this article. But focusing for now only on what you’ll hear in our premiere stream of the album, prepare to have your head torn off as the band tear through those seven more tracks.

The band’s propensity for inflicting heavy-grooved, neck-wrecking punishment is constant, along with their propensity for switching things up without warning — and a general attitude of extreme belligerence. But that’s not to say that all the songs are the same thing over and over.

That much becomes clear with “The Butcher”. Following right after “Malicious Motorcide”, they launch that song in momentous and morbid fashion, and with a wailing and writhing solo that’s both sinister and captivating — before they begin brutishly jackhammering spines, mercilessly spilling guts, and slowing into an episode of gruesome and grisly musical horror, in which the vocals scream.

As the band themselves observe, “The Butcher” might be the most dynamic track on the album, but all the songs turn out to be multi-faceted in both their moods and their methods of decimation. They inflict episodes of neck-wrecking hammer blows as well as the high-speed discharge of militaristic audio munitions and frenzies guaranteed to fuel circle pits, while conjuring changing visions of ghastly degradation, morbid misery, frightening ecstasy, and tyrannical cruelty.

The vocals are persistently monstrous and insane. The brute-force grooves are consistently compulsive. The fretwork is cutting and crazed, and reaches heights of wild abandon. Further exhilarating solos abound (with the best ones of all in “Legion of Doom” and “Slaughtercast”). And through it all the band inject lots of gigantic hooks to keep listeners coming back.

Not for naught does the album come recommended for fans of Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus, Immolation, Pantera, and Morbid Angel. See for yourselves how supremely good Display of Decay are at their chosen methods of death metal mayhem and mutilation:

 

 

The attention-seizing cover art for Vitriol is the work of Caelan Stokkermans. The album was mixed and mastered by Christian Donaldson of Cryptopsy and assistant mix engineer Dominic Grimard.

Gore House Productions will release it on vinyl, CD, and digital formats, and it’s available for pre-order now.

PRE-ORDER:
https://orcd.co/vitriol

DISPLAY OF DECAY:
https://linktr.ee/displayofdecay
http://www.displayofdecay.ca/
http://www.facebook.com/displayofdecayofficial
http://www.instagram.com/displayofdecayofficial

DISPLAY OF DECAY’S VITRIOL TRACK-BY-TRACK COMMENTARY

Malicious Motorcide

Malicious Motorcide is a wild ride from start to finish. It’s a song about driving over hordes of people in a fit of rage, the elevation in tempo and chaos felt in the song flow together perfectly with the lyrical content which was based around real events a member of our band was nearly a victim of.

The Butcher

The Butcher to me is the most dynamic song on the record. Its tempo fluctuates so much throughout to build up with the story behind the song. Initially, it started out as someone who was taken hostage and held against their will, soon to be burned alive, but we couldn’t help but draw reference to Diablo’s notorious Butcher who’s been featured in several of their games. The sheer heaviness of that intro and the catchiness of the chorus are guaranteed to turn heads and blow minds.

Legion of Doom

We have songs about serial killers, school shootings, and otherwise brutal methods of dying. Deep down, we’re just a bunch of nerds who love playing heavy music and this song really captures that. We wrote this one about the ‘Death Knight’ in World of Warcraft, because it’s badass and because we can.

Musically, this song was rewritten a number of times. I can remember a few minutes before a writing session, Brandon was on his way over and I was sitting there strumming along to warm up when I plucked the notes that would eventually become the chorus, and I thought to myself did I just write the best riff ever?!” Of course, I didn’t, but it’s a pretty damn great riff. This song is definitely more ‘progressive’ than the other ones perhaps, I feel there’s a definite nod to ‘Death’ in this one, but nonetheless, it’s about slaying monsters in Azeroth. FOR THE HORDE.

Familial Feast

This was the last and most unexpected song on the record. We had another tune initially on the record we ended up scrapping late as we felt it wasn’t up to par, but we had been jamming even newer stuff between recording sessions. Familial Feast just fell into place seamlessly and unexpectedly became one of our favorite tracks to play so it was a no-brainer to throw it on the record.

The lyrical content was written about Katherine Knight, an Australian-born murderer who in the early 2000’s killed and cooked her spouse with the intent of feeding him to his children. It’s a pretty wild case that never seemed to garner as much notoriety as one would expect with such gruesome details.

Harbinger

Harbinger is definitely one of the most technically challenging songs, if not the MOST technically challenging on the record. A frenzy from start to finish, this track features a wide range of dynamics stretching from sweep picking, and octaves, to full-on chaos!

Lyrically, it’s entirely based on Mass Effect and the Reaper invasion, because as previously mentioned, nerds.

Hot Lead Vengeance

This track was written right as we came back from the ‘Decimate the West’ tour in 2019. It was based on the growing number of senseless shootings going on around the world at the time. Every time you turned on the TV, every news network was covering a mass shooting somewhere, or some other act of senseless violence. It’s definitely an experience to sit and listen through and certainly not for the faint of heart.

Vitriol

The name of the track says it all. The lyrical content in this tune was written in a time of extreme rage and with that, the music just kind of followed. To me, it’s got the most powerful chorus of the entire record lyrically and musically because it’s simple yet effective.