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Death Metal Album of the Week: Wicked Innocence – Omnipotence

Following the course of American Death Metal through the early to mid-nineties shows the beginnings of a noteable schism in how bands approached Death Metal composition. As a new wave of fans became immersed in this extreme music, exposed via. mainstream outlets such as MTV and Music for Nations, the underground ethos of pure artistry became sacrificed to some degree, to reflect this broader audience. On one hand, there were bands like Cannibal Corpse, Deicide and Obituary dumbing down the music and setting a tradition of thoughtless extremity for musicians to pursue until this surrogate activity became formalised under titles like ‘Brutal Death Metal’ (also latching onto the furthest extremes of rhythmic Death Metal to that point – Suffocation, and the simplicity of Grindcore technique). On the other hand, an obviously smaller number of bands went in an opposite direction, inspired by the Jazz-infused music of Atheist and Death’s ‘Human‘, to create varieties of technical and progressive Death Metal. Whichever the case and whatever the quality of any individual example of music that sits within this timeframe, it’s obvious that there was somewhat of a spiritual decline in American Death Metal at this point.

To find this week’s prized album will then require us to venture away from the centres of Florida and the northern tri-states of America, and instead to Mid-Western Utah’s capital of Salt Lake City, famous for its infestation of polygamous Mormons. Here we find a band who were pretty much loners in that continent’s extreme music scene, but seemingly not placed there without a purpose. Their equidistant view of both scenes lead Wicked Innocence to create an album that, though sounding firmly in the camp of mid-nineties Brutal Death Metal, has a very progressive edge with lyrics that are closer to the cosmic existentialism of Cynic or Atheist. ‘Omnipotence’ gets rolling with a barrage typical of the aforementioned north-eastern, essentially, purely rhythmic style of Death Metal, but this music has very little in common with the tedious likes of Dying Fetus and Dehumanized, and gradually more and more progressive tendencies and flourishes of Floridan musicality creep into the album to leave an impression of something quite unique and stimulating.

Even on the level of rhythm, a direction is established within micro-rhythmic units of those riffs and sent spiralling into disarray with a Grindcore fervour for destruction. These kaleidoscopic patterns are hyper-extended into heavier chunks of guitarwork which get disintegrated further in another grinding sequence of powerchords that resembles a frustrated echo bouncing within the walls of some symbolic cube, floating meaninglessly in deep space. The melodies that tear out of this method resemble a less occult Incantation or Infester but are imbued with all of their insanities. Shades of Revenant appear in the shredding of more melodic riffs, whereby the rhythmical aspect is suspended above the beat, causing a profound sensation of impending death. As the album progresses, the melodic/rhythmic interplay becomes more integral to the sense of deconstructionism that the music conveys, revealing ever broader contexts of consciousness, like a reversed Hegelian dialectic. Bass guitar is extremely competent in underscoring this growing expanse of nothingness, similar in role to Cynic on their legendary demo, without being very discernably Jazzy. The drumming is reasonably technical as should be expected from any band that can trace their origins back to Suffocation, which the vocalist acknowledges with some amusing performances that are spewed out from an intestinal level of depth. Clearly, ‘Omnipotence’ was a timely release, before this intricate mesh of popular styles would be undermined by another generation of bands who randomly throw ideas together for no purpose at all.