Melbourne’s Deliquesce debuted with monstrous intent on 2023’s Cursed with Malevolence, an album so stuffed with brutal/technical death goodness that you’d have thought they were flies on the wall for the Pierced from Within sessions. Sure, there was a little Jersey ‘core sass – largely in the harsh, sharp-edged vocals – and sure, there were the tiniest touches of the good kind of metalcore – think Starkweather riffage – but overall the album was incredibly indebted to Suffocation and their immediate acolytes. Also, and this is important, it kicked ass.
Opener “Narcotic Entanglement” introduces many, but thankfully not all, of the tools Deliquesce use across these devastating 41 minutes: a barrage of blasts, widdly riffs, twitchy 8th/16th patterns, jazzy diversions, and blunt brutech passages. It’s tightly packed with ideas, just as this entire record is tightly packed with ideas: “Cryptobotanical Anatomy” blast thrashes you into oblivion before doing a rather classy, jazzy form of slam; the wild “Cyberdine Collapse” really shows off Armando Wall’s bass, has a little of that spacy Starkweather vibe, and sees guitarist Adrian Cappelletti getting downright demented with sweeps and weird channel switching; and “Corruption of Fauna” spices up the tightly-wound, blast heavy sections with a little slippery Ulcerate action. And so on and so forth. The record is a nonstop onslaught of stuff, but thankfully just about all of it is supremely entertaining and well timed, not to mention delivered with just enough variety to keep Saviour / Enslaver constantly interesting.
Vocalist James Cooper also adds variety through his various vocal styles and tones, from deeper gutturals to harsher, attitude-injected roars, while a variety of guests add even more layering and fun to the vocals. In “Compound Dysphoria,” for example, he trades some fun rapid-fire passages with Sanguisugabogg’s Devin Swank, while the aforementioned opener features Disentomb’s Jordan James (a natural connection, seeing as how Cappelletti is also in Disentomb).
All of the band’s tools and influences give Saviour / Enslaver a little more dynamic breadth than you might expect from a brutech record. There are plenty of times when things slow down and open up a bit, such as in “Erroneous Cruelty.” The guitars and drums still do their jazzy hooks in these passages, but instead of being a constant barrage of punches, it’s more like the occasional sequence of jabs coming in from seemingly nowhere. It’s a fun diversion, and Deliquesce smartly uses it to set up even heavier returns to the brutality. These little touches of dynamics also serve to help the individual songs stand out a bit more with each successive listen, albeit only to a certain point. This is, as stated, an incredibly dense record with songs that mostly flow right into one another with little pause. Differentiation isn’t exactly the point, especially not compared to the goal of flattening everything in sight. Consider that achievement fully unlocked.
Saviour / Enslaver is an absolute beast of a death metal album–brutal, crushingly heavy, blindingly technical, deceptively varied, and brimming with far more personality than you typically get from this corner of the style (not to mention impeccably produced by Cappelletti). It should be a no-brainer for fans of Suffocation, Defeated Sanity, and their ilk, but really, let’s not hold back here: if you like death metal, do yourself a major solid and get your head cratered in by Deliquesce.
