Immolation - Majesty and Decay

February 22, 2010

Reviewer: Matt

Few (if any) death metal bands have sustained a consistent quality of output over a twenty-year career. Immolation is one of them.  Even at their worst - 2005’s Harnessing Ruin - they were wildly enjoyable, employing their trademark riffing techniques in dynamic and unrelenting compositions.  Hope and Horror helped them recover some steam and Shadows in the Light turned out to be one of 2007’s stronger death metal releases.  Majesty and Decay, Immolation’s eighth album and first on new home Nuclear Blast, is a solid successor to Shadows in the Light and another worthy entry in their immensely impressive discography.

Those who feel Immolation jumped the shark after Unholy Cult will lament the same bass-heavy groove and influence of Nile, Behemoth, and new Suffocation that dominated the last two albums.  But these questionable aesthetic choices warrant only minor critique as Immolation has clearly weathered their ideological transition from tormented anti-Christianity to paranoid anti-modernity.  As Bolt Thrower channeled half a century of cold war, Immolation channel two decades of nonpolarity, and Majesty and Decay is a brutally militant vision of a cult leaders as heads of state, the atrocities by which they rule, and the death and disease in which the people cower.

Essentially similar in approach to Shadows in the Light, Majesty and Decay generally unfolds in the brooding tempos and subtly shifting rhythms of their mid-career but is conventionally harmonic and a tends to make jarring detours into controlled bursts of speed or break down into stilted grooves. Immolation are playing it safe, and while they’ve lost the ferocious vigor of youth, age has made them no less erudite, so while conceptually less adventurous Immolation remain masters at executing death metal technique. 

At ten full tracks however Majesty and Decay is a tad bloated, with perhaps less than ample attention given in each song to developing the motif before moving on to the next riff, as the riffs here are far too rigid to sustain the rapid, fluid transitions of their early work.  And as idiomatic modern death metal offers limited expressive range, Immolation in this chosen style tend toward repetition, simplicity, and integration of random or unrelated elements, ultimately exposing the band as bored with death metal but nonetheless comfortable enough with a formula to make an enjoyably solid mainstream album.

Musicianship is predictably of the highest caliber, and if there’s one modern trend they clearly buck, it’s the compulsion to wear proficiency on the sleeve.  Majesty and Decay is of course dense and complex but its technicality is never projected as an end in itself.  Production is, regrettably, uncomfortably polished.  Where big labels do wonders for promotion and management, the expensive studio productions they finance don’t appropriately render death metal in its raw naturalistic power. 

Those listeners who wait for the release of Majesty and Decay with breath baited for an album comparable in quality to any of their first five albums are delusional, as Immolation has clearly peaked and is now treading water.  Nonetheless Immolation remain elite musicians with an untarnished legacy for this highly literate take on admittedly unremarkable themes, and Majesty and Decay is still a better-than-average modern death metal album that is worth a listen.  

Release Date: March 9, 2009
Label:  Nuclear Blast Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Intro
2.  The Purge
3.  A Token of Malice
4.  Majesty and Decay
5.  Divine Code
6.  In Human Form
7.  A Glorious Epoch
8.  Interlude
9.  A Thunderous Consequence
10.  The Rapture of Ghosts
11.  Power and Shame
12.  The Comfort of Cowards

Total playing time:  45:03

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