Deeds Of Flesh
Reduced To Ashes

To say that Brutal Death goes through Deeds of Flesh is an understatement: Deeds of Flesh are one of the souls of Brutal Death, precisely they are the embodiment as well as the founders of the Californian branch. While in many fields this area of the States is synonymous with low commercialization, the concept needs to be updated for this particular type of music; contrary to what one might think, in fact, California represents the most extreme side of Death Metal. Arriving on the West Coast a few years later compared to the East Coast, Pacific Death immediately presents itself in a brutal form and purged of any Thrash interference yet different from New York Brutal Death. It's 1994, Deeds of Flesh release their first EP “Gradually Melted”: the technique is exquisite, the sound fast and powerful, without any playful intent; from this Mini CD, some of the most extreme bands of today will take inspiration, all concentrated in the same geographical area and signed by Unique Leader Records, the label owned by the Don Vito Corleones of the situation, namely Deeds of Flesh themselves.
But let's jump forward eleven years to 2003, the year this “Reduced To Ashes” was released. Anyone who has only listened to the aforementioned EP and then this album will hardly recognize in these musicians the same ones from far-off 1994; during their not very long but fruitful career, the three Californians have evolved their sound in an unrecognizable way while always maintaining the qualitative level at the top of the category, even further improving their instrumental technique. The album I am going to review represents in my opinion the peak of their second period, that is, the one that began in 1999 with “Path Of The Weakening”.

Anyone who remembers the splendid debut trilogy (“Gradually Melted”, “Trading Pieces”, “Inbreeding The Anthropophagi”) will have to get used to hearing another band by adapting to the new Deeds of Flesh; the alarm bell is the production that stops being filtered (in full Scott Burns Style) to become very clean and clear. Between the Spirit of Finesse and the Spirit of Geometry, the ensemble chooses the latter. And finally, we arrive at “Reduced To Ashes”, a truly complex, refined, and technically impeccable CD but lacking that fierce passion that characterized their early works. All eight tracks are damn well thought-out, to the point of reaching the pinnacle with “The Endurance”, an eleven-minute song (no intro or ambient crap, eleven minutes of Brutal Death!) born with the intent (almost achieved) of never repeating the same riff twice. The result is simply brilliant and earns them the title of Megalopsukoi of Brutal Death, but beyond the infinite difficulty of this piece, there is very little left. There's the coldness of the meticulously calculated music, there's the coldness of an ambitious project intended to be ambitious and nothing more. And this cyclopean song is nothing but the banner of the whole album: it starts with “Reduced To Ashes” and the rest follows rather smoothly but with the rigidity of a series of binary numbers. The technique approaches the impossible and challenges all the other "big" names in Brutal Death. The riffing is incredibly intricate, full of absurd passages worthy of the best Hobbs-Cerrito (the famous Suffocation guitar duo). Considering also that the singer-guitarist has no companion but does everything alone, one can understand his talent, an excellent vocalist as well as instrumentalist; however, his scores are, forgive the term, "snobbish" in the sense that they stand out from all the others with a certain sense of superiority that wants to be evident at every moment. The drummer is calmer, a kind of Clockwork Drummer (how funny I am today), a clock with hands, feet, and sticks that does not miss a beat and manages to create countertimes (which is an insult to call countertimes) and incredible prestidigitation. The cleanliness of his drumming is exaggerated, detached, devoid of any impulse, and decidedly icy. Rarely, as in “Human Trophies”, can one enjoy some groove, some more involved and engaging passages. But in the rest of the album, the only natural things remaining are the vocals of the singer and bassist (growling of different tones as well as alternations between growling and screaming) who instead renounce any kind of creativity to confine themselves to a precise but boring execution. Atmosphere? A word that sounds like a joke… Just as the lyrics of Deeds of Flesh speak in an absolutely aseptic way about this or that tragedy, this or that murderer, their atmosphere resolves into a mathematical operation.
Nonetheless, “Reduced To Ashes” is of excellent quality that would deserve top marks if I weren't so demanding about the spontaneity of the music; great performance by a now "refractory" band (a bit like the Cryptopsy of the Di Salvo era), which no longer puts heart into what it does but only the mind. But the mind is there, and it's a lot: “Reduced To Ashes” is an asexual Brutal Death, the carnage of an accountant.