Review by Vladimir on January 26, 2024.

South America was always rich with lots of extreme metal bands, both within the black and death metal branches, although I feel as if they had a more successful run with death metal bands in recent years. Case and point is the Chilean death metal band Deconsekrated, which released their debut full-length album Ascension In The Altar Of Condemned on January 1st, 2024 via Iron, Blood And Death Corporation. If you like death metal with an ominous and unholy feel to it, then you should probably stick with me on this journey towards the forbidden ones.

Deconsekrated provides quite a morbid, dark and brooding death metal with the standard genre output in terms of the band's overall performance. Their music consists of aggressive downtuned guitars with tremolo riffing, blast beats and double-bass drumming, and intimidating growling vocals, along with some slower sections that create a very dramatic vibe while displaying an ominous sense of omnipresent evil that lurks in the shadows. The best examples that show the darker and frightening side of their songwriting are 'Spectral Rites' and especially 'Litany Of The Blasphemous' with the Lovecraftian chanting in the first three minutes of the song, before kicking in with death metal massacre. From one song to another, it feels like one horror story told through chapters, which ends as if your journey through the dark ended as if you were swallowed by an endless void.

This album has fairly simple and standard death metal songwriting, with every song following the similar pattern while progressing to the next one. It's hard to actually highlight just one or two songs because all of them are very effective when displaying both brutality and intimidation, two ingredients necessary for creating just the kind of death metal that will raise all hell. The great thing is that there is stylistic consistency from one song to another, which makes this album easy to follow along and enjoy without being lost midway through. Judging by the lineup that is listed on the Metal Archives page for this album, it seems that they also had a guest appearance of the acclaimed session drummer Krzysztof Klingbein, who has been a go-to guy for many bands that made good use of his drumming skills. If there is anything else I feel should be addressed that compliments the album's overall atmosphere, is the cover art by Rodrigo Pereira Salvatierra, who transferred that Lovecraftian macabre vibe to it which perfectly matches the band's output. The album has a very brutal and sharp sound production that is on par with later albums from veteran bands such as Incantation or similar.

I personally found this album to be a very nice thrill ride that provides just the kind of death metal which suits my taste. It's got everything you can expect from a death metal album, but in terms of its dark and brooding atmosphere, this is where it certainly won me over. Should you come across this album and feel tempted to give it a listen, I can guarantee that you won't regret it.

Rating: 8.3 out of 10