Devangelic - Xul

Come on you know what it is

I like opening my reviews with something more than the utilitarian band history that so many tend to open with.  Just a preference of mine, you and I probably don't actually care what country a band is from unless it isn't one of the obvious places like North America, Western/Eastern Europe, Japan, or Brazil, ya know?  So I sat here looking at the Metal Archives page for Devangelic, a brutal death metal band out of Italy, trying to find some sort of hook that wasn't some idiotic pasta pun or whatever, struggling to find a good cold open.  I found nothing.  But I did find that the bassist is also in a grindcore band called Buffalo Grillz, whose MA page has the helpful note clarifying that they were only added based on the album Martin Burger King, so that's pretty funny.

Anyway the real reason I'm stalling is because I'm trying to delay the inevitable comparison for as long as I can, because this review could feasibly be four words long and tell you everything you need to know.  Xul, the band's fourth album, is an exhilarating massacre of a record.  What immediately stood out to me was the guitar tone, which should mean something since I know fuck-all about recording and only care about tone if it's noticeably terrible, so for it to jump out as so good probably means something to people who understand better than I do.  It's overwhelmingly beefy, which a prominent low end that lends a ton of extra heft to the already pummeling assault coming from the rhythm section.  It's got this neat little quirk where a lot of the huge powerchords feel like the root and octave notes are just a teensy bit more emphasized than the fifth, and it gives these moments a sound I can only describe as "steely" and I promise it makes sense when you hear it.  Those huge moments contrast amazingly with how utterly devastating the lion's share of the music actually is.  If you look at the BDM scene as a gradient with slam on one end and tech death on the other, Devangelic is approximately one picometer away from being fully enveloped in the tech death color.  Make no mistake, Xul is devastatingly heavy and crushes everything in front of it, each of the eight "real" songs are delivered with such pummeling ferocity at such a blistering tempo that I genuinely worry that my headphones are gonna catch fire.  It reminds me a lot of their countrymates like Hour of Penance and Hideous Divinity, the type of raucous hyperdeath that doesn't really fuck around with complicated licks requiring Petruccian manual dexterity and instead opts to just blow forwards with enough kinetic energy to topple skyscrapers.  It's the type of death metal that kinda becomes tech death on accident simply due to how unbelievably fast it is, which came as a surprise to me when I skimmed reviews of their earlier work and saw them pegged as a Disgorge clone.

I think there's a secret weapon here that helps Xul's head rise above the BDM pack so far this year, and that's actually the frequent breaks in the action.  For as propulsively destructive as it is, Xul avoids becoming exhausting in its assault with frequent breaks for ambient mood-setting and drawn out bridges that let the scenery wash over the listener.  The opener, "Scribes of Xul", takes the time to set the table with 30 seconds of vaguely Egyptian spooky noises, and sports several sections where a big chord rings out while one guitar descends an echoey tremolo pattern, evoking the kind of dread when opening a long dormant and almost-certainly-cursed crypt.  Closer, "Sa Belet Ersetim Ki'Am Parsusa" utilizes similar tricks, while "Sirius, Draconis, Capricornus" kicks the tempo down with a more pronounced mid-paced pounding, with "Udug-Hul Incantation" being even more explicit.  And that's to say nothing of a track like "Which Shall Be the Darkness of the Heretic", which is an express train to Blast City that allows itself to stay interesting by simply shifting the precise angle at which the riffs are punching you.  It's the musical equivalent to that million hit combo from Fist of the North Star.  Two extended interlude tracks also give some much needed space to breathe as opposed to wasting my time like interlude tracks so often do.  

Have you figured out the four words I could've just used as a review?  Were the track titles alone enough of a giveaway?  That's right!  "This sounds like Nile!"

That isn't to say this is a knockoff or a worse version of the American legends, not at all!  In fact I'd take Xul over a solid third of Nile's discography, but the similarities are just too obvious to ignore.  I tried not mentioning Nile in the previous few paragraphs as a challenge to myself and lemme tell ya, those two short paragraphs took nearly an hour to write.  It would've been so much easier to compare the guitar tone to Annihilation of the Wicked, compare Paolo Chiti's incredibly deep roars to Karl Sanders's incredibly deep mummy moan, the insane speed and variety of the percussion to George Kollias, the epic moments to the exact type of epic moments that Nile uses all the time, the ambient interludes sounding like one of Karl's solo albums, it's all right there.  Nile casts a tremendous shadow over this album and it's pervasive.  Every single element has a direct 1:1 comparison to some aspect of Nile's classic sound, and that makes my job as a reviewer super fuckin' difficult because all I needed to do was say it sounds exactly like Nile with no deviations and that would've been that.  However you feel about Ithyphallic or Those Whom the Gods Detest should be exactly how you feel about Xul, and if you've stumbled across this album in the first place, chances are you're familiar enough with the genre to be acquainted with Nile's work already.

So as a guy who really likes Nile, their middle era from Shrines thru Detest in particular, I also really like Xul.  It's hard to articulate because there's always an implied negative to being so similar to one band in particular (hard to avoid implying a band lacks creativity in that context ya know?), but in this case the worship actually saw some tangible rewards handed from the gods since this is on the exact level of quality that Nile churns out on the regular, and it turns out that having more bands making killer music just means more bands are making killer music.  

RATING: 81%