Immolation has been around for a while, a long while. The band has earned veteran status after forming in the late 80s and persevering through line up changes, fads, commercial exploitations, record label politics, and just the cruel weathering of time. Which brings us to now, and Immolation’s latest album Majesty and Decay. One might question the continued legitimacy of any band that has been around for two decades now. It would be expected that like many bands out of that era, Immolation would have slipped into obscurity or dissolved over time. Majesty and Decay offers a very blunt rebuttal to such expectations.

The album opens with an ambient intro of guitar echoing with waves of breathy noise and swelling distant booms. This leads into a outright assault of blast beats and dissonant strikes titled “The Purge.” Serving as an appropriate preview of the rest of the album, this opening track showcases many of the elements that makes Immolation remarkable today and not some artifact of an era long. The band’s technical ability surpasses much of the current “extreme music” contemporaries. The technicality of the instrumentation is balanced with a mature and bold and creative artistic direction. Immolation is unafraid to use piercing sonic textures, clean interludes, bizarre timings, juxtapositions of complexity and straight-forward primitive simplicity.

Guitarist Robert Vigna playing style and technique really give the album depth. Playing beyond just harmonies and palm muted bridge chords and dark, fast riffs. He experiments with odd dissonant squeals and octaves. Wailing solos erupt into striking and unexpected torrents of face-melting sound. This gives Immolation a very distinct, signature sound that is masterfully handled throughout the album. The songs don’t get old as Vigna weaves in and out of meaty riffs into atonal thrusts that cut into the mix giving real character. By conjuring such eerie atmosphere with aurally disturbing tonal pierces, there coexists both dynamic foreign, unsettling ambiance with brutal in-your-face salvos of pounding death metal.

The drumming is intense and dramatic, but not meant to be masturbatory. What is really interesting is the cadence and phrasing created by the drum work. Every tom fill and cymbal crash is not present to satisfy some obligatory pounding rambling or just some layered percussive density. It sounds more deliberate, creating punctuation as a structural component to the apocalyptic riffs and disturbing wails. This is not a mediocre death metal formula of just really good drums put on top of good guitars, the drummer is really contributing to the uniqueness of the band’s sound in a very participatory and active manner.

Immolation’s most recent release definitely won’t satisfy the die hard old-school metal heads who champion their early work as “revolutionary” or “innovative” or simplify a “mother f***ing masterpiece/s!” Some might point to the few weaker tracks on the albums and criticize the songs as stale musical left-over filler tracks, or piecemeal predictable compositions. Bottom line: Majesty and Decay is not Immolation’s attempt to reinvent the wheel, but it does show a progression and holds fast to both the familiar while progressing the unique. Immolation maintains their relevance and legitimacy with Majesty and Decay and do manage to transcend both old school obscurity and new-school novelty.

4.0/5