Customer Reviews

Majesty & Decay

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Immolation has been around for a while, a long while. The band has earned veteran status after forming in the late 80s and persevering through line up changes, fads, commercial exploitations, record label politics, and just the cruel weathering of time. Which brings us to now, and Immolation's latest album Majesty and Decay. One might question the continued legitimacy of any band that has been around for two decades now. It would be expected that like many bands out of that era, Immolation would have slipped into obscurity or dissolved over time. Majesty and Decay offers a very blunt rebuttal to such expectations.

The album opens with an ambient intro of guitar echoing with waves of breathy noise and swelling distant booms. This leads into a outright assault of blast beats and dissonant strikes titled "The Purge." Serving as an appropriate preview of the rest of the album, this opening track showcases many of the elements that makes Immolation remarkable today and not some artifact of an era long. The band's technical ability surpasses much of the current "extreme music" contemporaries. The technicality of the instrumentation is balanced with a mature and bold and creative artistic direction. Immolation is unafraid to use piercing sonic textures, clean interludes, bizarre timings, juxtapositions of complexity and straight-forward primitive simplicity.

Guitarist Robert Vigna playing style and technique really give the album depth. Playing beyond just harmonies and palm muted bridge chords and dark, fast riffs. He experiments with odd dissonant squeals and octaves. Wailing solos erupt into striking and unexpected torrents of face-melting sound. This gives Immolation a very distinct, signature sound that is masterfully handled throughout the album. The songs don't get old as Vigna weaves in and out of meaty riffs into atonal thrusts that cut into the mix giving real character. By conjuring such eerie atmosphere with aurally disturbing tonal pierces, there coexists both dynamic foreign, unsettling ambiance with brutal in-your-face salvos of pounding death metal.

The drumming is intense and dramatic, but not meant to be masturbatory. What is really interesting is the cadence and phrasing created by the drum work. Every tom fill and cymbal crash is not present to satisfy some obligatory pounding rambling or just some layered percussive density. It sounds more deliberate, creating punctuation as a structural component to the apocalyptic riffs and disturbing wails. This is not a mediocre death metal formula of just really good drums put on top of good guitars, the drummer is really contributing to the uniqueness of the band's sound in a very participatory and active manner.

Immolation's most recent release definitely won't satisfy the die hard old-school metal heads who champion their early work as "revolutionary" or "innovative" or simplify a "mother f***ing masterpiece/s!" Some might point to the few weaker tracks on the albums and criticize the songs as stale musical left-over filler tracks, or piecemeal predictable compositions. Bottom line: Majesty and Decay is not Immolation's attempt to reinvent the wheel, but it does show a progression and holds fast to both the familiar while progressing the unique. Immolation maintains their relevance and legitimacy with Majesty and Decay and do manage to transcend both old school obscurity and new-school novelty.

OUR RATING
(4/5)

I believe the band showed off its true colors for this album. Bringing out the old school death metal riffs (catchy and but not monotonous) with crunchy bass and drum annihilation. The guitars are dialed into more rhytmn,then solo and not be over whelming(compared to live). Some bands tend to battling or have dueling guitars. Here you have the progression of early Immolation but the polished age of technology. There is just enough blast beats and double based to keep it honest. There is not anything boring about this album from intro to outros,this is to be a death metal masterpiece. It proves why Immolation's bassist/vocalist(Ross Dolan) stands next to Deicide's(Glen benton),Slayer(Tommy Araya) and Morbid Angel's(David Vincent) as the best of all time.

let's get things straight, Immolation never disappoints and "Majesty and Decay" comes to prove, again, that they cannot be beaten by any other band around. Death Metal at its most intrincate, harmonious and relentless. Hands down! Immolation owns you all!

unfortually i buy a lot of the new music that comes out. normally i listen to the album all the way through several times before forming an opinion. most of the new albums coming out, even if its an old band releasing it, usually are forgetable. with my first listen to majesty and decay i new i had bought a special album. immolation is an old school death metal band from new york, they have been steadily releasing albums for twenty years. i have to say this may just be my favorit immolation album. i dont have every album that they have put out but i do own most of them and this album far exceeds the rest. robet vignas guitar playing is why i always kept coming back to buy the new albums, nothing changes there this has some great guitar work. what always bothered me about this band was there lack of interesting song writing as well as the vocals being to high in the mix. this album has the correct mix and the song writing is so much better and less cheesy the previous releases. the lyrical conent is the same and the drums and the bass are both of high quality. honestly could not tell you a better death metal album that has came out in recent memory.

I love music, I have a collection of about 700 albums which i have purchased and not illegally downloaded. My collection ranges from jazz, pop, rock, indie, reggae, world music, classical and of course, metal. Amongst some of the notable death metal bands I enjoy listening to (for example morbid angel, celtic frost, bolt thrower, behemoth, decapitated, nile, soilent green, vader), Immolation are one of my favourites. And this album is one of the favourites in my entire collection.

Their sense of groove, catchiness, technicality and solid record making make them a more enjoyable band to listen to. Of the 5 or so albums of theirs I own, I think Majesty & Decay is the best, and by far a seriously under-rated record. You are meant to listen to it as an album and not just for one or two songs. It has been one of the few metal records I have listened to without tiring of it and have returned to randomly since it was released. I don't know why this album hasn't gained more attention. I personally think it's an opus for Immolation and reviews, even out there on the net don't do it justice or reviewers haven't picked up on it's addictive quality.

If you like metal music and know how to really appreciate an album from a band that do an exceptional job, look no further. If, however, you are still discovering metal and are into extremity for the sake of extremity (ie. screaming and brutality) then I'm afraid you may not 'get' this album because you will simply be looking for some other type of thrill.

Magnificent job from Immolation, I just don't know how they can top this but I really hope they will in the future.

Some things never change. AC/DC continues to re-release the same album, Keith Richards is making like Dick Clark and mocking us all with his immorality, Cannibal Corpse is still the undisputed king of crap hill... And Immolation is still making quality death metal.

Really I don't think these guys have missed a beat in their 24 year(!) career. Majesty And Decay is not bucking that trend and actually surpasses their past 3 albums.

Instead of pushing the barriers of how heavy a band can sound like they did on the sometimes plodding Shadows In The Light, Immolation focused on making more diverse songs this time around. The first minute of "The Purge" goes through three rhythm and riff changes alone.

Vocals are what you'd expect from R. Dolan, the steady roar with surprising clarity. But the star of Immolation are the guitars - what makes Immolation Immolation is the deeply rhythmic and sinister sounding riffs. They're here in top form - and there's noticeably more of them than last time. Distorted harmonic solos are never overused or out of place, instead they're blended more into the rest of the song which makes for that greater diversity I mentioned before. When they feel like it the band goes into blasting mode, but are smart enough not to drag it out too long. Two highlights of this new approach are "Divine Code" at 2:34 - a very subtle low riff that sounds almost subdued and builds into a solo at the close and "A Glorious Epoch" at 2:22 - one guitar playing along with the bass and the second tremolo picking while the drums do well timed bass fills.

Drummer S. Shalaty had big shoes to fill after A. Hernandez left and just barely did on Shadows. It sounds like he's found his stride on Majesty, there's much more subtly instead of a "when in doubt, just blast" approach.

The problem is Majesty And Decay looses some of its impact if you separate the tracks instead of hearing it as a whole. It's not good for causal listening or being put on shuffle. But it's definitely worth letting the entire thing play through.

If you're in the mood for sinister, dark metal this will do you perfectly. Just don't expect a quick fix.

if you're into this level of metal, get this album immediately. That being said, the only complaint I had was that the jewel case arrived severely damaged. The disc is fine and completely listenable.

Immolation reached their peak on "Here in After," which was intelligent, complex, sensitive but warlike music. This new album is simplified, but also random, such that a riff gets paired with generic riffs and transitions, and somehow that becomes a song. No breathtaking profundity here, or the deeply involved composition of the past (although Bob Vigna's esoteric solos remain impressive). They've gone halfway to where Pantera was on "Far Beyond Driven," so this album should be a commercial success, but from a perspective of musical quality, it's dumbed-down, directionless and disappointing.