Dead Exaltation - Despondent Album Review
About the band
Dead Exaltation are a death metal band based in Pune, India, they started in 2015, they began as a five piece but due to unfortunate circumstances are currently operating as a duo, they began writing their debut album ‘Despondent’ in 2017 but didn’t release til february 2021.
Photo credit: Aditya Ranga
The review
Beginning with the first track ‘Gloom’ we start the album by hearing some creepy noises, drumming and what sounds like screaming, this track is only a minute long all the noise morphs into what sounds like a guitar scream and drums by the end. The next track ‘Involuntary Emasculation’ starts out with a loud, heavy guitar tune before the drums kick in and the heavy vocals blare through, there's a really cool break in the music where you only hear the vocals, which i kinda just found cool, the song ends abruptly.
‘Coerced sewer ingest’ is next and begins with a drum intro, when the guitars kick in you can hear it's definitely heavier than the last song. The next song ‘The Conversation’ is as the title suggests a conversation between a dude with a creepy ass voice and the guy he's keeping hostage i presume, it looks like it might directly correlate with the album cover (see below), this whole track is spoken, it’s kind of cool and works well to break up the album. ‘The psychology’ is next and it follows the same pattern as the rest of the album, although we do get a slower paced instrumental mid way through. This song is a lot less heavy than the rest of the album, although the vocals remain the same. Similarly to ‘The Conversation’ it helps break up the album a bit.
Album Art
‘The transformation’ is the complete opposite, loud, heavy and perfect for headbanging, ‘Omnia mors aequat’ is next and starts off super calm and slow and kind of foreboding in a way before a pause then the music explodes with that death metal heaviness, skipping ahead to the title and final track ‘Despondent’ It follows the albums sound and formula, not much i can say without repeating myself. As a whole its a really good album and you can definitely hear their cattle decap inspiration.
Photo Credit: Anuraj Nath
The conclusion
As stated above, I enjoyed this release, I especially enjoyed ‘The conversation’, having a track like that, that gives the album some kind of bigger story is really cool to me. I’d definitely recommend Dead Exaltation for anyone into bands like cattle decap
Social media and music
You can check the band out on facebook and instagram and listen to them on bandcamp, also check out the awesome interview I did with them.