The resurgence of old school death bands has been quite prominent for quite some time now with innumerable bands coming to my mind. But none captures or rather possesses your attention like Dead Congregation’s Grave of the Archangels. A lot of aggressive and violent adjectives have been already used to describe this album, but none does more justice than – Menacing. This menacing aura of the band is evident right from the beginning when the ominous tremolo picked solo pierces through your environment before giving way to the barbaric blasting in Hostis Humani Generis. Like getting smashed against the wall by some unseen inhuman force till the blood thirst is quenched. Hatred oozing out of this record is undeniable with its sinister atmosphere that comes with the frequent use of tritones in guitars.

With a strong tendency towards playing NYDM style made famous by Incantation and Immolation, Dead Congregation, a Greek band, makes a highly percussive death metal album which converges to dark passages before exploding out with total redundancy at the right instants. The music moves forward with a whole barrage of bad assed old-school riffs amidst the furious onslaught of blastbeats which results in recognizable dissonant atmosphere. The slower passages in the songs reveal the heavy Incantation influence as do the angular squeals of the pinch harmonics. While the bass could have sounded a lot cleaner, it does its job well in covering up the spaces between drums and guitars.

Clever interplay of guitar and the wicked use of tremolo picked melodies put the album at an all time diabolical high. The deep gutturals also stand as a good testimony to that. Drumming too is brutally savage with a little help from good production which saves it from being sound over-produced. The drummer in fact skillfully changes paces while cleverly shifting between the highs and cymbals at ease, keeping the momentum going string over the narrative. The album’s strength in fact lies with the band finding a perfect hybrid of brutal NYDM style breakdowns with massive Floridian style riffage in a linearly progressing structure that sets the perfect mood for anyone on a highway to hell.

As I rightly read somewhere that  Dead Congregation are indeed the ‘torch bearers of the mighty triumvirate of evil sounding DM – Incantation, Immolation and Morbid Angel’(though I think Morbid Angel lost that right long ago), Graves of the Archangels is easily one of the mightiest death metal album I have heard in a long time. The band has more than enough potent force in them to chart greater paths in the future, but till then stop frowning and start headbanging by listening to one of the best death metal albums released in the last couple of years.

Dead Congregation on Myspace