Ingested are a five piece operating out of Manchester comprised of former members of the now defunct Annotations Of An Autopsy (and drummer Lyn Jeffs who seems to have been in every other deathcore band). They throw down a blistering take on death-metal that is utterly relentless, and their third studio album The Architect Of Extinction is no exception.
Such a cheerful title fits the album’s bleak, blistering overtones, and is reinforced by some quirky, upbeat track-titles such as ‘Narcissistic Apathy’, ‘Endless Despondency’ and ‘Rotted Eden’. These are ten songs that are remorseless and frantic. You know exactly what awaits you from the immediacy of ‘The Divine Right Of Kings’, which grabs you firmly by the throat with a thick, abrasive tone, rolling drums and filthy, guttural vocals. There’s some nice variation of tempo, a super fast assault one moment before ‘winding down’ into slower, lower, heavier riffs. There’s motes of Job For A Cowboy as well as more ‘classic’ death metal deep, subterranean grooves.
Most of the adjectives we used in the above paragraph can be re-arranged and applied to almost every other track on this album. It’s a non-stop, breathless experience, from the bludgeoning, restless triggered double-kick work on ‘Endless Despondency’ through the totally unrestrained, unsubtle hammering of ‘I Despoiler’ to the huge, crashing cymbals and frantic picking of ‘A Nightmare Incarnate’. If you like aural torture that gives you no respite, you’re in the right place.
However, it all feels a bit ‘safe’, heavy and unsubtle almost for the sheer joyous sake of it. Where Ingested actually seem to raise their heads from the chum-riddled waters of the genre are the moments of deviation. ‘Penance’ is very, very good. Sure, you’ve heard heavy bands break it up with acoustic passages before, but rarely is it done so well. It wanders along, intercut and bolstered by the rest of the instrumentation, with vaguely uplifting tones and excellent use of both texture and space. Closer ‘Rotted Eden’ kicks in with a shifting, uncomfortable guitar refrain which returns and is built upon, seeing the band at their most assured and dominating.
Overall then, it’s a well executed and structured album that suffers from the individual tracks being unable to truly differentiate from each other in a big way. There’s nothing truly wrong here, and there are some killer moments, but Ingested needed to take a few more steps away from this well trodden path to create something truly great. An appetiser, rather than a main course.
