There’s a lot of weird and experimental death metal out there, but Norway’s Diskord has always taken that in some radically different directions than many of their peers. For the better part of two decades, they’ve gone for a dizzying array of riffs and ever-changing drum patterns, with their two albums and EP’s highlighting different elements. Part of this was due to a change in guitarist on almost every release, but with the addition of Dmitry Soukhinin in 2015 Diskord’s lineup has been stable ever since. This brings us to album number three, Degenerations, which is the band’s first new material in seven years and it finds them getting weirder and more fluid than ever before. Degenerations is likely to be an acquired taste even for those that like plenty of progressive and avant-garde leaning death metal, but those that are prepared to go on the ride will find this album to be genuinely exciting.
Similar to albums that came out earlier in 2021 from Ad Nauseam and StarGazer, Diskord presents listeners with a dizzying amount of drum patterns and riffs that are going to take a few times through to get a feel for. There are specific passages that might grab your attention on that first listen, but they change so sporadically that it feels like you’re on a rollercoaster ride that suddenly changes directions. This band has had a reputation as being akin to Autopsy meets Voivod on an acid trip in the past, and while some of that is true Degenerations comes through sounding even weirder than that. “Loitering in the Portal” starts things off with a darker, ominous guitar riff and chunky bass that feels like it’s going to collapse through the floor, before the drums come roaring in with weird time signatures and blast beats that change with every passing second. More so than Diskord’s past efforts, this feels like a complete deconstruction of death metal and prog where the puzzle pieces have purposefully been jammed together in wrong places. That’s likely to turn some people off, especially considering it’ll take a few listens before you can even make sense of some of the sections, but for me there were some actual hooks in these songs as well as new details that jumped out each time. In a weird way Degenerations feels like it takes the likes of Cynic, Atheist, and Gorguts, throws a little bit of Virus and Voivod in there, and then runs the entire mixture through an insane amount of Frank Zappa and free jazz. The mixing and mastering by Colin Marston also adds a lot to the experience, as it provides space between the instruments during key moments while allowing them to combine into a maelstrom of insanity during some of the fastest and loudest parts.
I have to imagine that coming up with vocal passages for such an abstract sounding record couldn’t have been easy, but this is another area where Diskord keeps things frantic and unpredictable. Where a lot of technical and progressive death metal have kept fairly standard screams or growls compared to their outside the box instrumentation, here the performances are just as outlandish and strange. There’s screaming, growling, and yelled passages that come through like the ramblings of a madman. Rather than typical death metal, the pitches and almost madman storytelling vibe reminds me of fellow Norwegians like Czral (Virus, Ved Buens Ende) and Aldrahn (Urarv, ex-Dødheimsgard). It’s abrasive, in your face, and likely to change minute to minute.
Like a lot of the weirder variants of metal, Diskord’s latest is likely to be a love or hate affair. If you’re looking for song structures that have an identifiable flow or narrative that makes sense, that’s not what you’re getting here. But if you want something genuinely weird, heavy, and adventurous, this is a must listen. It takes jazz structures, Zappa’s free-form progressive explorations, and plenty of death metal and churns out something the right listener can get a lot of mileage out of. I do think Ad Nauseam still tops it in terms of totally insane death metal, but this one is still going to land very high in my best of 2021 rankings. Degenerations is available from Transcending Obscurity Records.
-Review by Chris Dahlberg
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