‘Acts Of God’ starts with a brief intro track, ‘Abandoned’, which is delivered with a sultry, moody doodle before more six strings join the fray and almost tango in unison with the established musical score, creating a foreboding and atmospheric start to proceedings.
‘An Act Of God’ then hits you like a freight train, moments before the crushing and pummelling vocals of Dolan jump onboard and thus, we have the beginnings of an old school Death Metal brutality generating vehicle. Sit back, hold tight, you are in for one hell of a ride.
The album is delivered with passion and power throughout the whole of its running time. Its colossal in its make-up, fifteen tracks of genuine, savage, and barbaric Death Metal from the masters from across the pond. Immolation have never been known for holding back and they certainly don’t on this latest offering. You speaker stack will shudder and shake with the ferocity of chords and beats being generated from the grooves of the vinyl of this release, each track offering a varying style of Death Metal, slightly skewed from its album siblings, but each bringing an undertone of the same ferocious and fierce Death Metal.
The tracks are dark in their essence, yet on occasion we are opened up to a catchy and rhythmic melody, ones which you will find on tracks such as ‘The Age Of No Light’ and ‘Blooded’. Each track on this creation is fierce and uncompromising, each allowing the strings and fretwork to be mesmerising in their ability and achievements. The fretwork is ripping throughout and the percussion session from Shalaty is nothing short of genius.
This is a collection of songs which are there to deliver a perfect lesson in the art of old school death metal. The tracks have a base broad enough to traverse varying degrees of subject matter, the most obvious being religion as well as the state of the world as we live in it today, and then delivering on varying styles of approach, stirring instrumentals, smack in the face brutality and out and out prime cut controlled hatred and aggression.
It’s been five long years since ‘Atonement’, and admittedly a lot has happened in those five years, all of which has allowed us to prepare for the inception of this masterpiece of a Death Metal offering. Extreme, powerful, foreboding yet graceful and intricate in its own rights. Immolation have long spent their time camped in amongst the Death Metal Uber Gods, and ‘Acts Of God’ certainly allows them to take one step closer to being immortalised as Demi Deities.
(9/10 Phil Pountney)
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