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The Monolith Deathcult: Triumvirate
28/10/11 || BamaHammer
One summer a couple of years ago during my ninth and (hopefully) final year of college, I was reading a book by Graham Hancock called Fingerprints of the Gods, which is basically about the idea that the human civilization was created by extraterrestrials and is much older than popular belief would have us all to accept, but all records that prove that hypothesis have been all but destroyed by recurring global cataclysms much like the one the Mayans warn us should happen in 2012. Oddly enough, that was the summer I discovered a masterpiece of a song regarding this subject called “Deus ex Machina” and subsequently this genius album by a little-known group from the Netherlands called The Monolith Deathcult.
Their brand of brutal yet intelligent, electronically enhanced death metal can create an atmosphere that is really like no other band in the genre, while still retaining all the tasty heaviness. The guitar sound from Martijn Moes and Michiel Dekker is viciously detuned and provides a nice grind to the overall package, not really a thick distorted sound that’s typical of most death metal releases, but a good hard, ballsy grind. Sjoerd Visch handles the drum kit as adeptly as anyone. Robin Kok (insert joke here) produces some of the best burpy, deep growls since Chris Barnes’s heyday, and they’re all fairly decipherable, aside from the occasionally silly vocabulary. Oh yeah, and the bass guitar, the single most underrated instrument in death metal, makes an appearance on this album as well. It’s audible with a good tone, and that extra low end adds that extra touch of needed heaviness. I’ll never understand why that instrument is so underutilized in death metal. For further research into the effective use of the bass, check out Seance and Bolt Thrower, but I digress.
The record kicks off with the aforementioned 9-minute opus “Deus ex Machina,” and a word to the wise, if you start your album with a 9-minute track, it better be good. Not only is this the best track on the album, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it’s one of the best death metal tunes of all time. The intro still gives me chills to this day, and I’ve heard this song in its entirety more times than I can remember. Every time I’ve heard it, however, you just don’t feel like it’s 9 minutes long. It’s just that good and that groovy, and it keeps you interested the entire time you’re listening even as it fades into the tribal chanting of the beginning of “Wrath of Baath.” It’s truly an epic masterwork.
The rest of the album doesn’t hold anything I would call remotely terrible, but a couple of tracks aren’t quite up to snuff with the rest of them. I’ll never dig “Master of the Bryansk Forests” and never will, and “Kindertodeslied” doesn’t quite meet the standard set by the rest of the album, though it is written in German and that makes it inherently semi-awesome and gets it a few sympathy points. The instrumental rest area “M.M.F.D.” is a welcome and intelligently placed change of pace in the middle of the album, and it does a good job of setting you up for the final onslaught, the killer hat trick of “I Spew Thee out of My Mouth” (insert another joke here), “Demigod,” and the 14-minute composition “Den Ensomme Nordens Dronning.”
As if opening the album with an unbelievable 9-minute slugfest wasn’t enough, the Deathcult dudes also decided it would be a good idea to close it with a 14-minute ode to a sunken Russian submarine that starts off with a male choir singing an old naval hymn. You can’t make this stuff up. In any case, “Den Ensomme Nordens Dronning” is yet another highbrow death metal tour de force complete with orchestration and absurdly ridiculous lyrics:
Drunk with exuberance, she arrogates the briny deep.
Invulnerable became funereal after insubordination and sabotage!
I know I’m psyched.
Every day when I wake up, there’s that part of me that hopes today is the day some global cataclysm begins to put us in our place as a civilization in the grand cosmic scheme of things, if for no other reason than I would just like to see it happen. Does that make me crazy and a little bit creepy? Absolutely. Until then I’ll keep playing this album and hoping for the best.
- Information
- Released: 2008
- Label: Twilight Vertrieb
- Website: The Monolith Deathcult
- Band
- Robin Kok: vocals, bass
- Michiel Dekker: guitars, vocals
- Martijn Moes: guitars
- Sjoerd Visch: drums
- Carsten Altena: keyboards
- Tracklist
- 01. Deus Ex Machina
- 02. Wrath of Baath
- 03. Kindertodslied
- 04. Master of the Bryansk Forests
- 05. M.M.F.D.
- 06. I Spew Thee out of My Mouth
- 07. Demigod
- 08. Den Ensomme Nordens Dronning
