DEICIDE — Serpents of the Light (review)

DEICIDE — Serpents of the Light album cover Album · 1997 · Death Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
UMUR
Serpents of the Light is the 4th full-length studio album by American death metal act Deicide. The lineup is still the same, that recorded the debut album, consisting of the Hoffman brothers, Eric and Brian on guitars, Glen Benton on bass and vocals and main composer Steve Asheim on drums. Serpents of the Light was released by Roadrunner Records in October 1997.

The music on the album is brutal and mostly very fast-paced death metal. The album starts with the strong title track but slowly becomes monotone and generic to my ears. The songs don´t differ enough from each other and most follow about the same formula. It´s a pretty pummeling album with no time to breathe. I usually don´t have a problem with that but Serpents of the Light could have prospered from more variation IMO. The worst thing about this album is the lyrics though. As such it´s business as usual for Deicide with the Satanic/ anti Christian lyrics, and again I have no problem with that kind of lyrics as long as they are well written and serve some kind of purpose, but that´s certainly not the case with the lyrics on Serpents of the Light. Most of them are not only badly written but repeat the same lines endlessly. You´ll have to look a long time for lyrics this imature and quite frankly unbelievably stupid ( take a listen to Blame It on God. It´s probably the best/ worst example. I´m sorry man, but this is kindergarden stuff). Those lyrics really destroy my listening experience. Fortunately the music is actually pretty good even though the songs sound a bit too much the same and the musicianship is allright too. Well...who am I kiddin´? Steve Asheim is a tornado on legs. A very skilled drummer that one. Glen Benton mostly uses his low register brutal growling voice on this album and that´s a bit of a shame really. I miss the variation that those high pitched demon shrieks that he used on the earlier albums brought to the music ( they appear a couple of times). The Hoffman brothers were never virtuoso guitarists but their solo style fit the music well.

The production isn´t as good as I could have hoped for. It´s a Morrisound production by Deicide and Scott Burns, so from the look of that I have high expectations. The sound is a bit thin though and has a nasty cardboard box sound to it that I don´t enjoy one bit.

Serpents of the Light is a pretty average death metal album in my book and it´s obvious to me that Deicide were already rehashing ideas from their first three albums on this album. It would be a couple of albums before they at least tried to re-invent themselves again. Still an average album from Deicide is worth a 3 star rating.
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