Decapitated – Carnival Is Forever

July 12, 2011 • Nuclear Blast

I'm a bit torn on this album. Having never really heard much else by Decapitated before, I wasn't sure what to expect from their new album, and after a couple listens I'm still a bit confused on it. It's an pretty bizarre album that strays quite a bit from the technical death metal formula quite a bit, and it's hard to say whether that works well here or not.

To expand on that a bit, it's clear that this is still a death metal album at heart, as the drumming and song structures definitely have a pretty deathy sound, but many of the guitar riffs seem to fit in more with metalcore or math metal, with a lot of start-stop patterns, off-beat rhythms, chugging, hints of breakdowns, etc., and the vocals have a more thrash- or metalcore-like sound. I'm not sure how much I enjoy this combination. (It's not much.) Sometimes the band pulls it together really well, other times it seems too disjointed and confused, making it difficult to listen to.

The album doesn't have a whole lot of consistency either. The tracks nearer the beginning and ending of the album, the ones with a more traditional death sound, are actually not nearly as good as the ones that have the more math metal and metalcore influence (something I'm surprised to see myself say). This could probably be attributed to the fact that it's hard to make technical death riffs interesting, especially when directly compared to more mathy riffs, and that tech death is more or less played out by this point. Decapitated apparently has almost all-new members for this album and it does seem like they aren't really interested (or good at) that older, more traditional sound. That's a good thing, since it keeps the album interesting with the more progressive riffs, until they try to do the death metal and it just sounds generic and uninteresting.

For people who want the really face-smashing head-banging sort of stuff, sure, this is probably a good album to pick up. I'm not enthralled. With death metal, it's one place where I generally prefer the older, purer stuff (Atheist / Cryptopsy / Death etc.) and, while I admire Decapitated's ambition to branch out a bit and do something a bit different it doesn't wind up being as fresh-sounding as it should be and winds up being just another typical late '00s/'10s death metal album, like a weirder Vader (I guess that comparison makes a lot of sense, though). So I'm a bit torn as there are some really cool riffs and bits of songs (e.g. the Meshuggah-style riffs throughout "404", that one is pretty awesome), so I don't want to say I dislike it, but I'm not really sold on it either.

5