Review by Vladimir on March 22, 2024.

Here I am back once again with some more South American death metal, this time I’ll be covering the band Infection from Peru, with their third full-length album The Cryptic Homicides. If you are into gore-obsessed death metal with a bit of technicality and progression, feel free to join along for the ride.

Infection's musical output is primarily focused on intense death/thrashing style with plenty of furious tremolo picking riffs, guitar solos, guttural growling vocals and drums that switch between thrash metal drumming, double-bass drumming and blast beats. Although the riffs are for the most part heading towards the primitive and aggressive approach, they also have a lot of technicality going on with the heavy use of challenging guitar scales and palm-muted riffing that altogether create a very strong dynamic curve throughout every song. Speaking of dynamic curves, some examples like 'Sick And Depraved','Barbaric Hysterectomy' and 'Jackhammer Trepanation' showcase a bit more "progressive death metal" direction with some odd-tempo sections that use a lot of "climbing up and down" type of scales. The lyrical themes are nothing out of the ordinary, mostly your standard death metal subjects like torture, gore, sadistic intentions and butchering.

Overall, their songwriting is still rooted in the style of traditional death metal, but with some dynamics here and there that have a vast range of ideas. The arrangements do slightly differ between every song, and their musical dynamics can be considered as a big contributing factor to the effectiveness of their riffs and possibly the biggest highlight of this album. The album is stylistically consistent for a death metal release with pronounced ripping and thrashing action, but on the other hand, a lot of songs get a chance to provide some unusual riff transitions between sections of each song. Although the songs don't really stand out in any particular way, nor do they succeed at grabbing my attention and hold it for the entirety of the album, what they do however manage is to convey a lot of intensity and anger, while roaming freely to experiment with a lot of interesting riff ideas and exquisite guitar solos. When it comes to gore-obsessed death metal album covers, I am usually not really a big fan of them due to their forced and "over the top" nature, and I would always avoid paying attention to details no matter how good-looking they may be and how their artstyle stands out. However, despite my personal feelings, I still think that the cover art for The Cryptic Homicides, done by Indonesian artist Adi Christianize, deserves some credit for its excellence and eye-catching artstyle that truly conveys the energy and essence of Infection's music. Production-wise, there is nothing really I could other than the fact that the album sounds fairly alright and nothing too outstanding for a death metal release.

Overall, even though I didn’t find The Cryptic Homicides to be spectatular or anything, I still think it’s a very solid release worth a while. Infection’s performance as a whole is certainly tight and aggressive as one would expect from a death metal band, especially from South America. Feel free to check it out, I am sure you will like this one.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10