Possession

Many are the cases of bands that their influences of different genres have led them to make albums that the listener can’t categorize them easily into one and only one genre. Usually that can either lead to very interesting albums or to big failures. Recently I received such an album by a band that I hadn’t listened to any of their previous works, called Deep Desolation. Deep Desolation come from Poland and they were formed in 2009. Until today they have released three full length albums and one split. Their album Possession that I received is their third album which was released in May of 2015 and it contains five compositions. Into the forty five minutes that the album lasts, the listener will come across elements of Heavy, Thrash, Doom, while the elements that battle each other so that one of them to prevail and will be the one to characterize the sound of the album are the Black and the Death Metal elements.

The music that Deep Desolation present to us combines feelings of melancholy, fear, agony, anger, cold hatred, while the speed of the compositions is ranged between slow to fast , but without lacking of destructive, very fast outbursts which add power and passion to the compositions, or the very slow, atmospheric parts which escalate the agony and fear. The riffs are melodic, for their bigger part, and will remind you of a mixture of Heavy – Thrash with Death. They have a lot of beautiful rhythmic, Thrash parts, a lot of heavy but melodic Death riffs while the Heavy influences are not so obvious but they exist covered inside the riffs that I mentioned above. They make their appearance into a few specific parts and mainly into the solos which exist in every track. The tracks are quite long regarding their duration, from five to eight minutes while the track Divine Dance lasts nineteen minutes. Generally the band has worked a lot for the structure of the tracks, so the listener will come across beautiful changes into the riffs and the rhythm, while either with fast outbursts, either with atmospheric slow passages, either with beautiful solos they manage to catch the listener’s attention. What is somehow tedious is the fact that they make very little changes into the atmosphere and the feeling that the compositions put out, something that made me get bored into some parts.

Concerning the rest of the characteristics of the album, I cannot but mention from the beginning that weird, annoying noise that comes alongside with the bass and the drums into the entire album. Maybe the bass production is responsible for this result. The production is quite bass so that generates a noise, a cracking sound which is clearly audible into the compositions and it ruins the entire experience. The instruments on the other hand are played flawlessly. The guitars have accuracy and passion, the bass is intense and it fills the compositions well. The drums have quite interesting lines, while they are played with accuracy and power. However the sound that is coming out in a lot of parts is unfair for the good work that has been done for the instruments as a lot of times they sound out of tone, dissonant or flat. The vocals are harsh, quite expressing Black Metal vocals which add power to the compositions. Finally, the mixture is good as it has achieved to find the appropriate balance between the instruments. Unfortunately the result although it is quite solid, it sounds dirty, noisy and more bass than it should be. The lyrics are written in English and as someone can understand by the cover and the entire artwork, they refer to Demonic spirits, to rituals, to magic, to Satanism.

The album of Deep Desolation unfortunately belongs into the category of the big failures for me. It is unfair for a band which has done quite good job both regarding the compositions and the performance of the instruments, to destroy what it has built because it didn’t pay enough attention to the sound. This album could be a quite good release which is combining different kinds of genres without making them feel foreign to each other. However the quality of the sound is so bad that doesn’t let you enjoy what the band can offer. Maybe in a following release they correct their sound and offer us a good album. Avoid.