Beats and yelling: Desecresy

The Secret of Death
Out 21^st May on Xtreem Music

Since the departure of Jarno Nurmi in 2016, Tommi Grönqvist has steered the good ship Desecresy in painfully incremental steps from one album to the next, a process that feels like it’s finally bloomed on their latest album ‘The Secret of Death’.  Namely a synthesis of Bolt Thrower from ‘War Master’ onwards with the gothic sheen of chasmic death/doom, a story told with characteristically drab Finnish wit, evincing all the eerie atmosphere we’ve come to expect of death metal from this region. Era one of Desecresy, essentially covering the first three albums, continues to define the overarching aesthetic of this artist on this, their ninth album. But the tectonic plates of genre have gradually shifted under its feet, as track lengths have swelled and a metallic fluidity has slowly replaced the ordered sequenced pulses of industrial.

The production is perhaps the meatiest we’ve seen from Desecresy to date. The guitar tone is now the fully fleshed out, substantive hull of each track in stark contrast to the lo-fi, anarchic tone of earlier albums. The repetitive, trancelike guitar leads that have come to define this artist are very much intact, pivoting on unsettling harmonies and a haunting liminal poise expressed most obviously through fluctuations in volume and emphasis. Despite the continuity of this approach across multiple albums, on ‘The Secret of Death’ these elements seem to flow more organically, paradoxically more predictable in their informality as opposed to the uncanny regularity of the industrial approach. Drums are equally muscular. Atypical by death metal standards, they maintain a defiantly linear, barebones rhythmic approach, with tempos generally on the slower side, broken only by sporadic blast-beats.

Despite ‘The Secret of Death’ falling obediently into line with its predecessors from an aesthetic standpoint, there’s a clear turn toward a more freeform, metal centric approach on this latest offering. Tempos pulsate in looser waves of energy, instruments play off one another with an activism that negates the ambient unity of earlier efforts, and the rhythm guitar riding the momentum with wave like topography, building in energy and pace at certain intervals, falling to droning doom at others.

From one angle, therefore, it makes little sense to pass judgement on this as an improvement or otherwise on previous material. Desecresy hit their stride years ago and have been exploring the same, specific aesthetic, tonal, and compositional territory in ways both fruitful and compelling with a consistency that few can match. That they are now allowing us to glimpse this project from yet another angle, emphasising a more typical death metal beast with a doom accent whilst supressing the ambient and electronic influences merely goes to show just how much gas this artist has in its tank, and how, with the right approach and enough knowledge of ones own craft, the same picture can be renewed almost infinitely and still be in some sense constructive. This is in stark contrast to artists that really do just repeat the same trick ad infinitum and those that push through several stylistic and aesthetic boundaries with every release in the hope of hitting pay dirt. This, more than any recent example I can think of, is what consistency looks like. Neither a shrug inducing rerun of safe territory, or a hubristic vault into reckless genre splicing with little forethought given to what one is actually trying to say. Desecresy know what they are as an artist, what their place is within metal, and from there they have earned the right to explore this micro-environment with a degree of freedom few modern artists can enjoy.