Defeated Sanity’s first album is strong enough to be considered a solid brutal death metal release but it doesn’t portray the maximum capacity of the band in terms of composition or technicality in the execution. The precision displayed on the high speed blast beats is remarkable but lots of other bands have done the same before. Defeated Sanity’s distinctive element is how they manage to communicate this Dantesque amount of brutality in such a delightful way. Perhaps the only element in this record that you can trace to their nowadays sound is the drumming: relentless and brutal but so syncopated it ends up all refined, the use of the cymbals is very elegant and delicate in contrast to the contusive nature of the snare and the bass drums in extreme metal. The string work is ok for BDM standards but it’s nowhere near to the percussion in terms of creativity and innovation in this album.

Riffs are built upon fast melodies with an evil twist on the blast beat sections, but there are also “slamming” breakdowns. Slow, nice and heavy but nothing new or technically impressive. The tuning is not that low, probably tuned to C but not lower; this range contributes to the definition of the riffs and makes them memorable and more entertaining than a 7+ string wall of noise, for example. The bass guitar has a nice crunchy tone, most of the time it goes along with the guitars but when it separates as the lead instrument; it’s love at first sight. In some solos the slides are so neatly executed it sounds like a fretless bass and the chords are very appealing and strike when they suddenly appear.

The grunts are low and guttural in shape, linear in pitch. The vocalization isn’t very textured but it works for the genre because they are inhumanly deep. In general, the record is enjoyable and a nice 30 minute session of generic brutal death metal interpreted in an exceptional way by superb german musicians. The song structures featured here follow a traditional "intro-verse-chorus" formula and the atmospheres are built upon repetition, this characteristic gives coherence to the insane intensity of the music but if you want to hear something really groundbreaking you should study their further discography. Prelude to the Tragedy is not a bad album on it’s own, it’s simply not as spectacular as their most recent material.

Rating: 7 out of 10