The Ills Of Modern Man

 It was hard to believe the Canadian growlers could top the record that set the course for their whole musical identity, The Healing Process (2005), but they’ve pulled it off without a doubt. Despised Icon teamed up again with producer Yannick St. Amand, who has already produced bands like Beneath The Massacre and Neuraxis, and made a new album, The Ills Of Modern Man, with one big change: Yannick is no longer a member of the band. Focused on his new role, he’s done his producer job better than ever. His old duties are now handled by a new addition, guitarist Al Glassman, and the American, funnily enough, has had to start learning French so that talking with his Canadian buddies is easier.

Everything you could say about this record boils down to a tightly knit web of complex production, a whirlwind of sound made up of beautiful grindcore fragments, rumbling waves of rhythm and sounds that can switch from defined, crystal-clear purity to static interference and a bloodthirsty slurping-up of your concentration with meat-slicer guitars. Chaos constantly flows into order and order slips into chaos. On purpose. Just enough that the record isn’t suited to delicate pseudo-metalheads who brighten up their day with the tidy noise of the likes of Dimmu Borgir and similar. Despised Icon are iconoclasts. Despised Icon are blasphemous against every last pure form. Despised Icon are masters of noise that can turn into a song you’ll eventually remember. The tracks that open the record – ‘In the Arms of Perdition’, ‘The Ills of Modern Man”, ‘Nameless’ and the freshly re-dressed ‘Oval Shaped Incisions’, which you may have already heard on their debut, a split album with Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus) – scrape the face right off your skull, no mercy. The similarities with the second half, with tracks like ‘Furtive Monologue’, ‘Quarantine’, ‘Sheltered Reminiscence’ and ‘Tears of the Blameless’, are less noticeable sonically, since these are much smoother-flowing, layered, methodically lucid and directed in a way we’ve run into before, with the likes of Meshuggah. The peak of the climb to the summit of catharsis is definitely the song ‘A Fractured Hand’. Pain, rage and the tearing off of bodily shackles are materialized as jolts of impulse in the neural networks of your fragile body. They surprise you at every turn. Another real endurance test is ‘Fainted Blue Ornaments’, which closes out the record. Sickeningly groovy, orchestral, melodically packed to the last corner. After this provocation of your brain and your hearing, the album plays out to its end. A shred of mercy for those who dared to follow the red thread of introspection without a break is the pleasure of seeing the whole picture.

For the last few years you could hardly argue with the fact that everything coming out of Canada is worth less than the American masterminds. The US has fallen to pop. You know how it is – everything that smells of core is a near-cloned copy of something you’ve already heard. Only a few rise above the repetitive patterns – The Red Chord, Job For A Cowboy, Beneath The Massacre… Canada swears by musical superiority that doesn’t swagger and doesn’t puff itself up at every insignificant breeze. Despised Icon are undoubtedly pretty overlooked, but they quietly carry on down their path. An album is only as good as what the individual songs can offer you musically. And they follow that imperative. In their own way, and in an avant-garde, provocative manner.

The Ills Of Modern Man is already their third album, and stylistically it doesn’t budge an inch from the extreme, brutal metal pushed to its limit, which spectrally shifts between death metal, deathcore and a modernized take on grindcore. Where Napalm Death paved the way, new sonic clusters of noise, grotesquery and relentless tempo are being built. After the explosions of bombastic sound, slower passages sneak into the songs now and then, and with their more melodic slides and stretches they calm the agitated face of the furrowed compositions only so that the effect of the next detonations hits that much harder. Despite its pretty avant-garde and provocative stylistic direction, the record isn’t totally unlistenable, because inventive guitar riffs, quick rhythm changes that often wander into totally unexpected territory, and monstrous breakdowns all bring color and extra appeal, and they’re why the album is anything but a two-dimensional heap of shapeless mass. We’re used to two vocalists in bands like Linking Park, right? Despised Icon swear by the vocal duo too. Alex Erian and Steve Marois growl, scream and squeal, filling the gaps between the wall of noise and near-total silence with technically clever stylistic touches. Deathcore fans will drool over this one too, since now and then the band turns to more mellow metalcore-style singing in individual choruses.

The Ills Of Modern Man is therefore not just a brutal and technically flawless conglomerate of different genres – it’s also a record that gradually eats its way into your cerebral cortex and, if you survive the massive brain hemorrhages, stays there.