Defeated Sanity – Chronicles Of Lunacy Review

[Cover artwork by Jon Zig]

Yes, I’ll have the kangaroo soufflé, please…

“FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, NOT ANOTHER METAL WRITEUP WITH FOOD ANALOGIES” ~ the sensible denizens of planet Earth

I understand it’s overused, and I know you’ve seen similar metaphors a trillion times before, but why opt for the same old same old yet again when something unusual and maybe even a bit startling leaps out as an option amidst an endless array of fish tacos, grilled chicken boobs and sliced tuna steak salads. Routine is fine, but gourmands appreciate having their palates challenged, and that same premise rings true for goremands, the greedy and insatiable consumers of brutal death metal.

So, what to do when you’ve been in this game for decades and an average of a hundred or more death metal albums get thrown your direction every single year, as is the case for many of you and all of us who continue to march under the Last Rites banner. Well, you catch 40 winks during 90% of the umpteenth bands trying to out old-school the actual OSDM bands still managing to galumph along; you drive straight into a brick wall to save yourself from hearing yet another Bolt Thrower clone; and you roll your eyes right out of the sockets when the fifth promo of the day tries to convince you that [Band X] just reentered Earth’s atmosphere after crafting the world’s most avant-garde death metal record whilst circling Mercury for six months like some sort of gurgling satellite. Sweet, merciful grave, call your children home.

OR…

You just get fucking weird. Or at least weird-er. And no, that doesn’t mean listening to the new Nile album while breaking into the neighbor’s house to do an upper-decker in the master bath while they’re out at the farmer’s market. I mean get weirder by seeking out more challenging death metal, which is precisely what lead the Last Rites collective to go bananas over records from Nithing and Trichomoniasis last year, and drilling earworms from the likes of Theurgy and Submerged in 2024. We like to get freaky with death metal, so we plumb the fathomless depths of the more brutal end of the spectrum and haul to the surface only the darkest, dankiest, dafuckiest musical monstrosities we can scrape, because by jingo, at this point in our lives we turn to archetype records such as Pierced from Within to help us unwind before bedtime. That last bit has a lot to do with long-time familiarity, of course, but still… Yanni Live at the Acropolis, you’ve been violently dethroned. [upside down mustache]

While on the subject of ‘relaxing to brutal death metal’… Was 2020’s The Sanguinary Impetus a relaxing album? Having now lived with it for a few years, I believe that hunch could be confirmed. Yes, of course it’s still brutal death metal from one of the ultimate conquerors of the genre, but Defeated Sanity emphasized the technical end of the equation in a way that underscored the bounce, so it almost felt… merry? Ferociously merry? Like a runaway teacup ride where everyone aboard is being attacked by bears. How do you stop looking at that? How do you stop listening to that? Easy answer: You don’t. Thusly, The Sanguinary Impetus worked, and even if a random hitchhiker would find it to be just as evident of your sanity literally being defeated as would any other album from DS, we of the faith recognize Sanguinary as a departure, just as we recognized the preceding Disposal of the Dead // Dharmata as a deviation in and of itself. Hey, wow! Defeated Sanity is curiously explorative inside brutal death metal’s relatively strict confines, and they’ve always been so! That being said, with Sanguinary as the closest release in our rearview mirror, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a small part of me was concerned that Defeated Sanity might very well be mellowing with age.

Well, pound shit, me and any other luckless butt-wipes overly concerned about Defeated Sanity going soft, because the band has decided to very literally murder us all with lucky number seven, Chronicles of Lunacy. Yes, absolutely, we’re all terrifically familiar with that tired maxim from enduring bands related to “It’s our heaviest to date” or “this one goes back to our roots,” but in the case of Defeated Sanity circa 2024: Mission accomplished. Mission accomplished as balls.

Here’s an important thing to consider before we inch forward: I’m kind of an idiot. Not in all facets of life, thankfully, but when it comes to understanding exactly what’s going on inside the 34-minute assault that is Chronicles of Lunacy? Idiocy embellishes me with enthusiasm. What is Defeated Sanity doing, and how are they doing the things that they are doing? What a super great question. Basically, the band has rediscovered how to force the listener into a tornado that whips around the housewares section of every Crate & Barrel in the state, so enjoy limping away from the stereo with a $700 Barista Express machine cratered in your tuchus. There’s so much happening inside each song here that my first, second and even third pass simply registered as, “This is meaner than Sanguinary, faster than Disposal, and much, much crushier than Dharmata. Hooray, Defeated Sanity is my friend!”

The moment I started listening to the album through a nice pair of headphones with undivided attention, though? “OH MY LORT, MY FRIENDS ARE TRYING TO KILL ME. THIS IS AWESOME.” I can provide really smart analyses along those lines in abundance, but if you’re interested in a 10¢ break-down that might actually mean something, consider this: Chronicles of Lunacy is like the AP version of Chapters of Repugnance, in that it feels similarly furious and ruthless, but with everything the band has discovered and developed since.

Like, what the actual bonk, “The Odour of Sanctity.” How does a band cram every Bond car chase into a single song and still make things sound organized and purposeful? I am asking you that question, Defeated Sanity, and I am fully expecting you to just… you know… point at the video. I very much appreciate how this band realizes that unsophisticated soreheads such as yours truly need visuals to help the brain understand what’s afoot. Something that’s even more remarkable, however, is the fact that “The Odour of Sanctity” might be one of the more straightforward songs on the record? I mean, it all might as well be a ten full cabinets of calculus textbooks avalanching into my head, but shit really starts flying through unpredictable switchbacks and loop de loops moving forward. “Accelerating the Rot,” for example, *casually runs over your impressively vulnerable body like a godhead thresher. (*Casually, if ‘casually’ was something as fast as the train to Busan.) Take note that there’s a very pleasant return to that decidedly Floridian ‘Deicide and Scott Burns circa 1992 introduce listeners to molten hell’ attached to the riffin’ & hurryin’. Also, wtf, 2-minute mark.

Watching these videos makes it seem at least feasible that one-time Defeated Sanity players became ex-DS players simply because Lille Gruber regularly showed up to rehearsals with sheet music that looked like he printed every word from Anna Karenina onto a single page.

“Here you go! You need to play that in about a half hour from now.”

“LIKE HELL I AM!” [kicks through the door and joins a Mortician cover band]

Now, when I say this record harkens back to Chapters of Repugnance, I fricken mean it, including the sparse but apposite samples scattered throughout. But this ain’t exactly a carbon copy of Defeated Sanity’s past. Longtime bulldozing bassist Jacob Schmidt and drum abominator Lille Gruber have refined and upgraded their respective proficiencies over the course of the last decade plus, and they’ve surrounded themselves with other players who’ve similarly dominated their respective wares. Consequently, we do still get a fair pinch of Sanguinary’s sophisticated bounce hither und tither. What REALLY throws a fun curveball in 2024, though, is the addition of electro toms to Gruber’s already impressive kit. It’s an almost hilarious addition at first blush, particularly in the way they suddenly jut out amidst the sheer savagery like a happy seal poking its head up in the midst of a violent sea storm, but, as is customary, Gruber finds a way to make something strange work beautifully within the DS blueprint of slamming violence.

You will also notice a couple of fairly lengthy tracks on the record: “Temporal Disintegration” [5:52] and the brain collapsing ear-driller “Condemned to Vascular Famine” [6:00] (actually, the last three songs all flow into one another, with “Condemned” as the wheel’s absolutely screwy center, so it’s almost like a 14-minute closer). Unsurprisingly, the two longest cuts cram everything you’d likely hope to discover crammed inside a Defeated Sanity song, and that includes some greazy slowness glutted with that Disposal of the Dead-styled thiccness. Snack on “Temporal Disintegration,” and pay special attention to the heft that lands around 2:30 that gets dragged even deeper into a hideousness with Josh Welshman’s glottal “UUUURRRRRRRGGGHHH.”

BREAKING NEWS: Clearly, I don’t have much negative news to attach to this record. I will, however, admit that you will do yourself all the favors by spending a great deal of time getting to know Chronicles of Lunacy through a nice set of headphones without your kids, cats, dogs, spouses, bosses, buddies or parole officers breathing down your neck. You really want to hear what every Defeated Saniteer is up to at all times, because each member definitely brings their A+ game to the table. So, yes, it’s an ideal headphoner.

Beyond that, if I could throw just one more chunk of applause toward this thing, I’d aim it at the fact that Chronicles of Lunacy appears to prove that these guys—or, at the least, principal songwriter Lille Gruber—does not ignore what’s currently moving and shaking inside their scene. That seems somewhat rare when it comes to legacy acts that so often declare things like, “We don’t really pay attention to what other bands are doing.” By contrast, it wouldn’t be surprising in the least to discover that these dudes mine the New Standard Elite bandcamp page as often as the rest of us, and that really helps keep things fresh and even more intense. Plus, it doesn’t actually come across as gratuitous chest-thumping, but rather a band simply reminding their successors precisely why Defeated Sanity was and continues to be a definitive Final Boss in brutal death metal.

Oh, and Chronicles of Lunacy beats the living hell out of the kangaroo soufflé. FULL CIRCLE, BABY.

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(Here is Beethoven listening to the new Defeated Sanity)