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De Lirium's Order

Veniversum

Written by: MST on 14/11/2012 22:51:43

Finland is the home of many a metal act, but so far we haven't seen many technical death metal acts come from the country known for its folk metal and saunas. De Lirium's Order have come to change that. "Veniversum" is the third opus by the Finns since the band's inception in 2000. The line-up on this record is a completely new one though, as main man and lead guitarist Juha "S.M. NekroC" Kupiainen completely revamped the line-up during 2010 and 2011, including the band's new vocalist Kari Olli.

The music present on "Veniversum" is characterised by technical riffs in between sections of regular death metal riffing, drums varying in tempo, and average-sounding growled vocals. If you think you've heard music described like that before, you're absolutely right. For most of the album, we're talking standard technical death metal, and we're not even in the high end of the technicality scale. The only thing that makes this release stand out a little are the clean vocals used once in a while, and used extensively in closing track "The Aftermath", a slow progressive track. Olli's clean vocals are sort of proggy, and they sound like they could potentially reach the level of a certain Mikael Åkerfeldt, but no matter how good they could potentially be, they sound completely out of place on this album. That's going to be a matter of taste though, because I despise the clean vocals on the latest The Faceless album as well.

So, DLO aren't doing anything new with "Veniversum", so it all comes down to whether or not the band are able to take the regular recipe and make the dish taste super awesome. The short answer is: meh. The production sounds completely sterile, effectively eliminating every punch the guitars were packing. As mentioned earlier, the vocals are quite average, and while that doesn't mean that they're bad at all it just means that the vocals are never an interesting aspect of the music. The drums are good, and quite varied, though I would've preferred a faster pace in general.

This review turned out to have a very negative tone. The reason is mainly that I was expecting something a lot more interesting than what "Veniversum" has to offer. All isn't bad though: when the drums are blasting and Kupiainen is shredding his ass off, songs like album opener "Autistic Savants" really stand out from the rest of them. Sadly though, the overall feeling I get from repeated listens to the album is a lack of identity, consistency and intensity. In today's sea of technical death metal, there are plenty of interesting fish to choose between. With "Veniversum", De Lirium's Order fail to prove that they are one of them.

Download: Autistic Savants, .44
For The Fans Of: Gorod, The Faceless, Quo Vadis, Neuraxis
Listen: Facebook

Release date: 16.03.2012
Inverse Records