Review by Vladimir on November 1, 2023.

Are you a fan of brutal death metal with excessive and technical guitar riffs, solos, growling vocals, and blast beats? I hope you are, because the topic of this review will be covering the Canadian brutal death metal band Display Of Decay and their fourth full-length album Vitriol, released on October 20th through Gore House Productions.

Kicking things off with the opening track 'Malicious Motorcide', the music starts ripping flesh with wicked and technical guitar riffs, a lot of blast beats and double-bass drumming, and monstrous growling vocals. At times you will briefly come across some interesting bits that provide more to this already established chaos and destruction. Tracks like 'The Butcher' and 'Familial Feast' contain some sections in slower tempo that include furious tremolo picking guitar riffs and growling vocals with backing harsh vocals, while other songs such as 'Legion Of Doom' thrash metal-like moments on the third track. The songwriting is very standard brutal death metal with technical and chugging riffs, technical guitar solos, growling vocals and harsh backing vocals, blast beats, breakdowns, double-bass drumming. Funnily enough, even though the songs are completely packed with various riffs, solos etc, the album still manages to be quite short with a total length of 29 and a half minutes. When it comes to the overall execution of Vitriol as a whole, at times it feels like very monotone and one-dimensional brutal death metal with quite generic ideas , but what I think saves it from absolute mediocrity are the occasional tempo changes which add some dynamics to the musical output. The biggest issue that this album suffers from doesn't really have anything to do with the general songwriting, but it's more the fact that it never really manages to surprise you in any way or another and once it reaches its conclusion, it just ends without any grand pay off that would really make you want to revisit it. On the plus side, I think the best thing about this album by far is the cover art by Caelan Stokkermans, who previously contributed his skills to other well-known bands like Lorna Shore. I don't really have anything to say about the sound production of this album other than the fact that it is quite standard for a brutal death metal with the polished guitars and drums as the forefront.

Overall, I can't say that this is a bad album by any means but it is certainly a very typical brutal death metal output that you would expect from any modern day band. Perhaps it is just a matter of fact that this style of death metal isn't really my cup of tea, although I simply can't stand seeing bands not attempt to put any additional effort to make their work stand out any better than the rest. I have no doubt that people who are into typical brutal death metal will definitely like Vitriol better than I did, but I do believe that other people like me will not bother to give this one a second chance.

Rating: 6.9 out of 10