From the very first notes of “Amputationsdrang”, it’s clear that Defeated Sanity has left its explicitly progressive phase and returned to a much more familiar, visceral assault. But let’s not fool ourselves: beneath the shape-shifting blast-beats and gurgling vocals, Chronicles of Lunacy is anything but a conventional death metal album.
If you were to listen distractedly to this new opus, you could mistake it for yet another fire-and-brimstone death metal band. But underneath the blunt force aesthetics, the increasingly less German quartet continues to experiment and expand the possibilities while remaining true to their niche. It’s one thing to play fast and virtuoso, but quite another to really transcend the conventions of a genre that’s been remade over and over again.
Barely half an hour long, Chronicles of Lunacy features eight incredibly dense and complex tracks, where ideas blend together in labyrinthine fluidity. The pace at which things flow, and both the spectral and expressive registers in which the music evolves, demand a certain knowledge of death metal. With a vast baggage of previous references and specific influences distilled into these compositions, nuance and detail are best appreciated when one has acquired this nestled erudition. But there’s also that nerdy side. You feel you have to know jazz, Latin rhythms and contemporary composition to get the keys to this music. It really is “art” music, even if it doesn’t have the seal of approval of academia.
Defeated Sanity’s secret has always been its ability to cling to the impenetrable, bloodthirsty aesthetic within which the band seeks to innovate, namely the Californian sound of the 1990s (Disgorge, Deeds of Flesh, Severed Savior). This was true of their more overtly progressive albums, and it’s also true of this new opus, less explicit in its exploratory side, but no less thoughtful. An album that’s hard to decipher, but that gets more enjoyable with every listen.
