Deicide- In the Minds of Evil review

There’s little to say that isn’t already known about the death metal legends that are Deicide. The band perfected the blasphemous and anti-Christian thematic leanings that were already employed by the likes of the first wave forefathers or even their marginally earlier contemporaries such as Morbid Angel. Was this provocative running theme in any way original? No, but the band presented similarly impious musings with a new found crudeness, ferocity and aggression that did not need to lean back upon indirect expressions of sacrilege such as references to the occult and alternative path topics, and instead were more blatantly profane. This November sees the release of Deicide’s latest studio endeavor, ‘In the Minds of Evil’, an album with admittedly high expectations among the fan’s long-term fans (a pretty large one, considering they are the second most commercially successful death metal band of all time), in addition to the fact that the post-‘Serpents of the Light’ output has been of varying degrees of quality, although not of a purely hit or miss nature.


Thematically, Deicide hasn’t really expanded beyond their audacious iconoclasm, as the title of the songs and albums reveal, but really, Deicide is one of the few bands who can stick to this mode of action and not be deemed monotonous and derivative. The same can be said for their music – it’s essentially an exaltation to their already well known signature sound, but reinvented in a sense by adding subtle tweaks to their otherwise formulaic approach that continues to the metal world enraptured. The first half of the album is laden with simple rhythmic ideas that are structurally rather simple, ranging from the syncopation-driven riffing on tracks such as ‘Beyond Salvation’, to roving riffs that give way to the establishment of a repetitive groove that serves to increase the memorability of compositions such as ‘In the Minds of Evil’ and ‘Godkill’. While the guitars here are seemingly sterile, they help to illuminate the more subtle melodies that Jack Owen and Kevin Quirion embed within simplistically structured and cyclic songs.