I can usually tell of I am going to like or dislike an album after a few moments. A few skips from track to track, hear the vocals, the production etc. I can get a general idea pretty quick. Sure, there are anomalies, growers, late bloomers and stuff I’m just not feeling at that time in my life I might appreciate later.

Thus was the case of Germany’s veteran death metal act Discreation, whom I was not familiar with despite existing since 2001 and having three previous albums under their belt. It’s a classic example of a band that left a pretty ‘meh’ initial impression from the album’s first few tracks, but as other tracks from the album’s second half randomly popped up on my ipod, the band warranted further investigation and in the end I ended up really enjoying the band’s no frills take on death metal.

Immediate comparisons are clearly Vader, largely due to the vocals of Kai Müller-Lenz, which have a authoritative gruff, but clear bellow akin to Piotr Wiwczarek. The music has some similarities as well being thrashy, burly and percussively dominant but with just a shade of clever melody and restraint, which imbues a bit of Hypocrisy.  One could also look to label mates Weak Aside for similar delivery, though not as war mongering or simplistic.

Either way, there’s a handful of tracks on Procreation of the Wretched that bring the pain, especially in the later two thirds of the material, where things seem to get in to more of a stern groove and march, as opposed to sheer blasting. After the album’s first two rather forgetful tracks, “Planetary Punishment” and “Descending to Abysmal Darkness”, things start to pick up about halfway through “Megacorpse”, signalling the improvement in the album. Then the fucking beefy trundle of the title track really gets things going and it’s ON for the rest of the album as each of the following 6 tracks just seems more confident, destructive and memorable, and thusly the whole album becomes so as well.

Don’t get me wrong, like the bands I’ve mentioned as comparisons, this isn’t changing death metal , but it sure does everything pretty well perfectly within the paradigms so staunchly championed in the 90s. No techy noodling , no sweeps, no intellectual prose, just , bludgeoning double bass backed beefy riffs and lyrics about war, fire, skulls and destruction and all that other negative shit that death metal extolled in its formative years. The likes of “To Cosmic Shores”, steam train chug of “Decapitation Marathon” and the moody pummeling of closer “Dead Certainties” is just the very epitome of what death metal was and should be. No frills, no gimmicks. Just… Death. Fucking. Metal.

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