I’ve talked at length about my distaste for overly progressive music, and no genre draws my ire for incorporating unnecessary fluff more than death metal. I’d even go a step further and say that I really don’t enjoy much “beauty” or “fun” in my death metal at all; just give me the raw, stinking sewage and keep your melodic and atmospheric death metals.1 Of course, this is all just personal preference, but I can’t stand when bands like Blood Incantation, Tomb Mold, or even the mighty Death2 add so much experimentation that the songs cease to exist as songs, becoming instead exercises for demonstrating technical ability and/or progressive sensibility. I’ve always been far more impressed by virtuosity that blends into music in such a way as to be almost unnoticeable at first glance, when it bolsters a songs momentum instead of derailing it. Let’s see if Entering the Gateways, the debut album from Finland’s Disguised Malignance, can strike the right balance between thinking-man’s and stinking-man’s death metal.
Disguised Malignance is a young project comprised of equally young human beings, and while they have a proclivity to add progressive elements into their old school death metal, their youth prevents them from leaning too far into “artistic” territory. These guys write killer tunes first and foremost, the flourishes added serving only to provide bits of atmosphere to heighten the experience. These 18-20-year-olds obviously spent their school years studying the works of Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, and Death, because Entering the Gateways is a category-4.0 hurricane of Floridian devastation. Single “Confined” is a hulking beast of lumbering groove, flattening all in its wake, and it has rapidly added immeasurable hair to my chest and untold pounds to my bench press.
The songwriting on display here is nothing short of impressive. I saw an interview in which 18-year-old vocalist and co-main songwriter Felix Pennanen (he impressively also performed guitars and drums on the record) explains that the album is supposed to flow like its artwork, moving from the overtly grotesque towards the unexplainable and unknowable, and in that regard, mission accomplished. The opening duo of “Gates to Nihil” and the aforementioned “Confined” is by far the most standard OSDM section here, and it’s followed by “Unearthly Extinction,” a number that begins a slide into extraterrestrial territories with the inclusion of some Death-ly lead guitar work. Disguised Malignance’s progression culminates in penultimate track, “Disengagement into Eternity,” a seven-minute opus that takes a detour into some spacy Blood Incantation weirdness, but unlike that project, these guys know how to keep such forays brief. In this case, the weirdness is used merely as exotic seasoning on the otherwise meat-n-taters death metal. Too many bands these days are trying to serve us mouthfuls of seasoning as the main course, and this tends to upset my irritable bowel syndrome.
For such a young band, it’s mind-blowing how many things Disguised Malignance got right on their first attempt. At 34 minutes long, Entering the Gateways is easily digestible, and the songwriting prowess and progression across the runtime make it nearly infinitely re-playable. The production is just amazing; it’s the best-sounding record I’ve heard all year. Everything is so clear and audible, and yet there’s still an overwhelming heft—due in no small part to the incredible bass performance by the other songwriter, Aatos Palmu—that suits the album’s malevolent payload perfectly. This combination of nasty death metal songwriting and killer production reminds me an awful lot of one of my personal favorite modern OSDM bands, Mortiferum. If you like the style at all, you’re going to like this entire record, but check out “Gates to Nihil,” “Confined,” “Unearthly Extinction,” “Malignant Visions,” “Disengagement into Eternity,” and the crushing closer, “Beyond (Entering the Gateways),” for the most impressive highlights.
Equal parts thinker and stinker (in a good, death metal way), Entering the Gateways is a clinic on how to perform old school death metal with a light progressive glaze. I fully expect Disguised Malignance to lean into that progressive weirdness the next time around, and thus, I’ll probably hate it. But I’ll always have this album, born from their youthful innocence. No, it’s not groundbreaking, but that doesn’t stop it from being my favorite death metal album of 2023 thus far.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 12 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prosthetic Records
Websites: disguisedmalignance.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/disguisedmalignance
Releases Worldwide: September 29th, 2023
