Possessed - Revelations of Oblivion

Bitch, siddown, be humble

I'm going to be disgustingly frank with y'all here.  I'm writing this for two reasons alone.  One is because I'm ageist as fuck when it comes to metal and I really wish the legacy bands would just go the hell away and make room for the young bands with fresh ideas to actually take a fucking foothold in the scene before all of the old fogeys die and metal as a genre goes the way of doo-wop because metalloids are terrified of change.  And the second reason is because I just really want to get 100 posts on the year.

So Possessed was kind of an easy choice for me when I wanted to make this argument.  It's been 33 years since their last LP, and in the interim they've either been broken up or busy releasing meaningless singles.  And exactly as I suspected, it was hailed as pretty uniformly great by critics and fans in the corners of the internet I hang out in.  I've seen this movie before, it happens every fucking time Overkill or Judas Priest releases something.  Classic band releases a mediocre album and gets showered in accolades because they were great thirty years ago and didn't release Illud Divinum Insanus, and apparently that's all that's necessary to wind up sweeping Album of the Year lists across the net.  Fuck this shit, move over and let Xoth shine or something.

And that's why this is such a humbling experience for me, because against all prejudice, Revelations of Oblivion is actually pretty fucking excellent in many ways.  I think between this and the new Nocturnus album this year, I'm starting to question my long-held stance outlined above.  Maybe the issue isn't that old bands need to go away and stop hogging all the limelight, maybe they just need to write albums as great as Revelations of Oblivion in order to justify the instant praise they get.

For a band that's been more or less dormant for longer than I've been alive, this is pretty much the best album I could've expected out of them.  Despite most of the band being a few heartbeats away from being able to order off the senior menu at Denny's (barring guitarist Daniel Gonzalez, who is only in his late thirties) there is a hell of a lot of youth in the sound here.  The adrenaline is off the charts, and the pace stays consistently high.  The overall feeling of this album is just fuckin' ferocious, with razor sharp riffs tearing through at nearly all times and drumming that feels like a tommy gun.  There's definitely a feeling of aged professionalism in how tight the riffs and songs are, but that youthful energy that keeps things sounding wild and dangerous actually never left the band.  This is no replacement for Seven Churches, mind you, but it is worthy of the legacy, which is something I never thought I'd say.  Tracks like "Ritual", "The Word" and "No More Room in Hell" rip like motherfuckers.  This is that perfect nexus point between thrash and death metal that Possessed pretty much nailed all by themselves way back in 1985, and for once being timelocked in such an era is a huge boon to the album since they're clearly really fucking good at it.  Also worth noting that the solos are fucking incredible.  Every time these two guys let loose they melt face, and they're the clear highlight of the album to me.

This isn't perfect, however.  There are a few flaws that keep this album from being truly exceptional.  The biggest problem is easily the length.  Death metal almost never needs to be nearly an hour long, and twelve tracks of such a non stop assault just feels like overkill.  Yeah I know two of them are instrumental intro/outro tracks, but it certainly doesn't make the album feel any less daunting.  The songs themselves tend to feel longer than they actually are and I feel like that's merely the fault of the songwriting getting kinda repetitive at times (I swear the chorus of "Demon" loops like fifty times throughout the song).  The mix is pretty overwhelming as well, with Jeff's surprisingly clean thrash-like vocals absolutely dominating the space, with the rest of the band taking a distant-yet-still-crazy-loud second place.  So it's not particularly dynamic, but in fairness this is death metal so that'd be a crazy thing to expect this to be super varied or something.  Really the complaint is just that the vocals are stupid loud.

So overall I gotta eat my foot a little bit.  Legacy bands definitely still have a place in the current zeitgeist of metal music, and I wouldn't complain one bit if they were all as good as Revelations of Oblivion.  This doesn't bring anything new to the table and Jeff Becerra certainly hasn't spent the past few decades evolving much as an artist or vocalist, but when "Abandoned" is on, I just find myself looking in the mirror and saying "Ya know what, BH?  Who fucking cares?"  This is what Possessed is good at, and if they can keep this momentum while trimming some of the needless fat and repetition, they really and honestly could reclaim the death metal crown that they invented all those years ago.


RATING: 81%