Drawn and Quartered – Congregation Pestilence

Band: Drawn and Quartered
Title: Congregation Pestilence
Label: Krucyator Productions
Release date: 02 July 2021
Country: USA
Format reviewed: High-quality Digital Recording

Once again it is time for a random pick as I usually do it and this week the roulette wheel provided me with Seattle based Drawn and Quartered and their newly released album “Congregation Pestilence”. So, let us not waste any time and get straight to it!

Quite the brutal scaled death meta is upon you right from the beginning. It´s fast, brutal as mentioned, but simple in its form with the riffs. Muddy guitars and distinguished drums infuse “Death´s Disciple” but when it comes to “Age of Ignorance” a frantic lead guitar tries it´s best to steal the attention, which kind of works out for it. “Oblivion Pilgrimage” is too drenched in a solo guitar that adds…hard to say what it really adds. A lot is going on in all three tracks up to this point where much is on top of each other which makes it hard to track the actually nice riffs and the solo guitar doesn’t make it easier to try and track certain interesting things.

The star of “Dispensation (Rise of the Antichrist)” for sure is the drummer who steals the entire show and the stage with an interesting arsenal of drum patterns and lightning-fast double bass which the riffs sound a bit weird and repetitive, which is something this group appears to keep falling into after about a minute of each track. “Six Devils (Trepanation)” is a good example; it opens with a really heavy intro, like a death-metal Slayer and yet when the first minute is over, they fall back into that weird choice of guitar riffs, but at least they are performed well and are quite fitting, it´s just that they tend to have a harmonic tone to them that sounds…off? I’m way sure though that fans of faster technical death metal that lean towards old school will find this group perfect.

The final track is the title track, “Congregation Pestilence”, and I always have higher hopes for those than other tracks. It starts in almost a parody kind of way but who knows, perhaps this sort of playing is a part of death metal that I haven’t really gotten into. It’s strange, because I was interested after the first track to hear the rest, and I do admit that I heard some cool things here and there but after the whole thing I have to say that I was waiting for something that never came. Perhaps not exactly the group´s fault at all, maybe it was just me that was expecting something else. It´s fairly tight with an alright production, but other than that I do not know what more I can say… 5/10 Julia Katrin

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5/10 Floating in the sea of mediocrity
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