Self-released
Release date: Feb. 1, 2021
Production: Dražen Kecman
Album length: 35.50 min
Genre: Death Metal/Thrash Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
The year is 2021, and Slovenian extreme metallers Decatholicize from Maribor are back! This is a band with exactly the right name for these times, and a debut album with a title that’s every bit as loaded. Decatholicize formed in 1989 but went by the name Newsagent until 1991. If you’re still keeping up with that sentence, it’s worth adding that the band released an EP of four demo recordings in 1993, then quietly called it a day, with no big ceremony.
A good two decades later, in 2017 to be exact, the band came back to life. Original members, drummer Alan Breber and guitarist Mladen Buletinac, rebuilt the quintet, but it only found stability after 2018, when lead guitarist Jošt Skale joined the crew. These days, when the Slovenian metal scene probably gets up to five albums a year, every album release in any metal subgenre with a whiff of hellfire about it is a real revelation.
So the band has finally unleashed its studio debut. There was plenty of material, and they picked the best of the best from what they had on hand or had written. Nine polished tracks and under 36 minutes of music sounds very promising, which means there’s most likely no filler on the album. And yes. There isn’t any. Since there was still a lot of room left on the CD, the band added three more tracks recorded in 2018, back when the lineup still had guitarist Denis Agović and bassist Nedeljko Krljić. The theme is clear: the urge to breathe with free lungs. Smashing taboos, tearing off chains and shackles. Let’s hope the vibe and message of this album are another little stone in the mosaic that helps wake up a critical mass, one that shatters humanity’s age-old tormentors, including most of the self-proclaimed middlemen of God. Ominous aggression, uncompromising bite and raw sonic corrosion are all well and truly embodied here.
The first thrash metal bands appeared in Slovenia at the end of the eighties: Sarcasm from Kranj, Game Over from Jesenice, Železobeton from Murska Sobota. Decatholicize definitely helped pave the runway toward keeping sonic extremes current and pushing speed even higher. “Remains of Dominance” embodies that. What we hear on the debut is a mix of death metal elements with a noticeable influence from old-school thrash phrasing. In the late eighties, when the Decatholicize story begins, the band members must have drawn inspiration from at least Slayer and Kreator, even if you can’t directly pick that up on “Remains of Dominance”. It’s death metal propped up by the hard-hitting influences of the old thrash school, drifting here and there into classically seductive heavy metal structures, which means that despite all the ominous bristling, the band still has a good dose of theatrical musicality. The band skillfully harmonizes its lead phrases with guitar ornaments, pays attention to building up moods (the detailed intros), and switches the atmosphere by shaking up rhythmic keys and structures, leading to a jerky flow of dark theatrical drama that runs through the whole album. A pleasing growl vocal is a must for this approach and an important element in intensifying the album’s dark vistas.
So the band isn’t reinventing the wheel. But within its own vision and artistic sphere, it comes across as remarkably tight, convincing and grounded. The guys stay faithful to a musical formula characterized by an old-school mix of death metal and thrash metal, and handle it with skill. The substance of this release may not cause any earth-shattering tremors of musical innovation, but its strength is that, even as it speaks to the familiar and the homegrown, it can’t be directly compared to the bands trying their hand in this genre. “Remains of Dominance” is brought to life by excellent production, which gives the record a contrasty, penetrating width and depth. That also guarantees constant dynamics across the album and the groove effect you want. The building blocks of the sound are finely contrasted, so the three-dimensional space of the soundscape is easy to feel. At the center of it all are the fitting growl vocals, which bring in theatrical menace and gloom and coexist in a colorful split with grinding bass lines, bristling, massive, lower-droning phrasing and a solid rhythmic backbone, which keeps the story tense across the album with inventive fills at the transitions. The compositions are carefully detailed, and that’s reflected, among other things, in the mid-eight passages, seasoned with classic but witty guitar solos, while the songs never lose the thread for a second and stay compact.
This is a creative manifesto and a strong studio debut, which is hardly surprising. The combination of the old school with fresh, up-to-date takes on the extreme edges of today’s metal had to see the light of day eventually. It’s a debut that’s rich in ideas and atmosphere, and the band can be very proud of it. With gigs not allowed and no telling when they’ll be back, let’s hope this doesn’t slow the band down or sap its drive, since on the other hand it opens up a lot of time for writing new music. Time to bring back some old ideas, which no doubt sit up their sleeves like hidden poker aces, and to create new ones too. “Remains of Dominance” proves that the quintet caught the right moment of solid chemistry in the studio, so now is the right (and last-call) time for Decatholicize to deliver another studio chapter to the metal masses.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Demon Divine (4:40)
2. Take Our Souls (3:08)
3. Isotope 235 (4:08)
4. Retribution Awaits Us All (2:44)
5. Down To Four Men (4:22)
6. Life Imprisonment (4:26)
7. Doomsday Machine (4:41)
8. God Ends Here (4:22)
9. Remains Of Dominance (3:17)
bonus tracks:
10. Into The Eyes (3:28)
11. Grind The Mind (4:08)
12. Armageddon (4:41)
Lineup:
Jure Vandur – vocals
Jošt Skale – lead guitar
Mladen Buletinac – rhythm guitar
Leon Pondelak – bass
Alen Breber – drums
Denis Agović – lead guitar on tracks 10, 11 and 12
Nedeljko Krljić – bass on tracks 10, 11 and 12
