“THERE IS NO DANA, THERE IS ONLY ZUUL!”
Sure, Devangelic spell it a little differently for album number four, and while they aren’t busting any ghosts on Xul, they do bust the myth that Nile is the only worthwhile Egyptian-themed death metal band. There’s no denying that this Italian quartet owes a debt to America’s favorite Egytpologist, but listening to the opening stretch of “Scribes of Xul” will certainly show they have no qualms with taking on that debt.
Devangelic leverages a similar approach to riffs allowing them to swirl, churn and pummel in equal measure. The biggest difference is that the songwriting spices in more of a brutal/slam mentality than a theatrical one. That is most quickly revealed through Paolo Chiti’s guttural vocals that hit some vile lows and bubbly gurgles. He also tends toward holding notes more often than Mr. Sanders does with his generally rapid-fire approach. The mind of the deranged gutter-dweller reveals itself more as the petals of brutality further unfurl throughout the album. Devangelic like a slam riff and breakdown passage; more importantly, they want you to try to crack concrete while you listen to it. The album opener has a late slamming chug to set the stage. There are plenty of passages like that, but Devangelic isn’t afraid for that style of writing to dominate a song, either. In fact, “Sirius, Draconis, Capricornus” spends the vast majority of its runtime walloping the listener with a breakdown-style guitar line that sounds like it was originally written on a sitar. It flows and crashes like a rushing river full of bloated corpses.
With this style of music, one would think a shorter track would be the most vicious. Devangelic, however, use all five minutes of “Worship Of The Black Flames” to set the listener ablaze with the power of a thousand funeral pyres. The song is downright unruly, with the guitars running so fast that they would likely play 20 extra bars of music even if Mario Di Giambattista stopped picking. It opens with a wild acoustic guitar that transitions into violent electrics. The song follows that unwieldy path with a moment where some real froggy gurgles echo over relentless kicks that will have crowd killers salivating to dive into the snake-pit mating frenzy.
While Xul is less theatrical than a band like Nile, they are not completely devoid of the dramatic. “Famine of Nineveh” and “Hymn of Savage Cannibalism” are both short instrumentals with sitars, gongs, clean vocals and weird noises. The rare lead work wails like a zealot praying to a cruel god, including one in “Ignominious Flesh Degradation” (great song title, by the way) that’s squiggly enough to make you think the strings had a taint with several electrodes attached to it.
In the end, if you prefer your Egyptian-themed death metal skip the pageantry of mummification for the brutality of the blood, guts and severed heads of human sacrifice; Devangelic’s Xul has you covered.
