Desecation – Despoiled Ethereal Purity Review

[Album artwork by Jon Zig]

Important question: Does tolerance suck?

Not all the time, clearly, as it’s often tied rather closely to the ever-important trait of patience. Additionally, developing a tolerance for certain things can and will open the potential to making someone / something much stronger. Have you ever seen monks in Shaolin taking endless kicks to the bojangles? Impressive. Unadvisable as balls, but impressive.

Spice level tolerance? Pretty cool. But people who use their majestic tolerance for all things Scoville scale-related as some weird flex can largely get in the sea. That said, I will always appreciate how the show Hot Ones flips that script into something wonderful.

Booze and drug tolerance? Now we’re getting into tricky terrain. Largely unhealthy, and a conceivable reason to perhaps show a modicum of concern if you get to a friend’s house and find either a two-story beer bong and / or a fat bag of dark purple weed called “Sorcerous Ogre Taint” tucked between the sofa cushions.

Which brings us to Despoiled Ethereal Purity.

Take a much younger version of me experiencing Loudness’s Thunder in the East back in the mid ‘80s and suddenly force this sophomore full-length from San Diego piledrivers Desecation into my snuggly ears? To be perfectly honest, I’m not even certain it would have registered as music, let alone a highly mutated form of heavy metal. I guess that’s what 40 years of maximum exposure to extreme metal will get you: Tolerance. (And dain bramage). Let’s go ahead and chart this evolution from, say, Loudness to King Diamond to Kreator to Deicide to Anata to Desecation—we have finally ascended into glorious madness, and the beatings will continue.

Them:
“Oh, I listen to everything!!”

You:

No more auspicious words can be uttered to a fan of brutal death metal than “Oh, I listen to everything!” Please, bless-ed buzzed pate of Frank thee Tank, let that phrase be said on a first date whilst firing across the galaxy in a chariot on the way to the local Sizzler. [serenely presses play]

Look, I really don’t know enough about anything to identify when music like this is being largely improvised, but it almost becomes comical how many riffs are thrown at innocent eardrums inside these 30+ minutes. With the above “Wormhole,” as is the case with every track here beyond the brief interlude that is “We Wait for Charon,” the listener is forced to withstand an unmitigated assault of riffs that come at you so fast and from so many angles that all you can hope to do is raise defensive hands in hopes of not ending the affair by looking for a frozen brontosaurus steak compress to ease your conquered face. How the hell does a band like this know which riffs and drum patterns to fire off when they play tunes like this from the stage? And kudos to Desecation for end-capping this total bushwhacker with a creepy time-stretched excerpt from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.

Vocals? Sure, I guess. But you can’t convince me that the voice you hear up and down this record ain’t coming from an angry Cassowary bird that’s pissed about you wandering into their territory. They’ll fuck you up, you know that, right? It’s a fucking dinosaur bird, Chuck Darwin, so wander into the game with a little bit of caution, unless you want this flightless bulldozer of a bird to punt your marbles right up into your guts: “Their strong legs allow them to jump up to 7 feet in the air and kick with enough force to break bones.”

Listen to that series of stern warnings grumbled out after that long howl about 50 seconds into “Congenital Dystrophy.” And hey, this song also shows that the band isn’t fully afraid of slowing things down to allow a scant few moments of… humor me here… rest.

What’s interesting is the fact that the clobbering and BREATHTAKING wall of noise that mows you over amidst initial spins eventually begins to open up on repeated listens. Surprise! The guitar work flashes some really snazzy nuances the further you dip. Sure, there are less than zero leads if you don’t count the weirdly pretty intro track, but melody absolutely does enter the picture. The closing moments of “Botched Cranial Biopsy” and “Examination of Your Respiratory Tract,” for example, and especially the outset of the album’s title track.

Still, the primary objective is to overwhelm the listener with a bonkers amount of speed (I’m guessing the drummer sweats more than Ted Striker in a nosedive) and battery, and Desecation manages to do so with a weirdly uplifting sense of flare. So, yeah, this isn’t actually a very dark record that will shift your mood into terrifically grim things as it hustles along. Instead, think of it more like… getting a deep tissue massage from a Silverback on bath salts: Holy crap, that’ll bruise, but you’ll be back for another sesh in the not-too-distant future, big boy.

So, I suppose this is the 10¢ question: Should you be concerned if you find a copy of Despoiled Ethereal Purity tucked between the cushions of your good bud’s couch? Nah, they’ve just reached a Shaolin monk’s level of zen tolerance as it relates to brutality, and that is a beautiful thing.

Didgeridoo-diddly-dive in, suckas!