The last time I took a hit of acid was around 1989. It was the beginning of the summer, and my friend Serge's band Buttsteak had just played at a local bar in Richmond, Virginia.  I asked him if he wanted to dose after his band played, and he nodded enthusiastically.  What we were thinking taking a tab of LSD at 11:00 PM was beyond me, but we went back to the six-story warehouse my own band rented just off the railroad tracks by the James River and all took a hit.  By the time it really, really kicked in we were on the roof of the warehouse at two AM and the keyboard player in my band put on MORBID ANGEL's "Altar of Madness".  Serge leaned over to me conspiratorially, with a tinge of real fear in his voice, and whispered, "this music is EVIL." It was a lot to take in: the summer moon over the cold James, the silhouettes of abandoned factories in the background, my friends drunk and high on the roof, and the relentless, unforgiving violence of one of the early greats in death metal making an unlikely soundtrack.  By the time the sun started to rise, I told myself I'd never trip again, and I never have.  I was 21 at the time.  I'm an old man now, and while I still haven't done anything slightly psychedelic since then, I do find myself diving back into MORBID ANGEL and DEICIDE and the other greats of early death.  DEIQUISITOR's roots clearly reach back to those days- at its core it's a scholarly tribute to these bands, but there's this undercurrent of trippy, noisy, psychedelia that weaves its way through the 40 minutes of "Apotheosis'' that's undeniable.

The album sounds as if every instrument was dragged pain-stakingly up a mountain side after being dredged up from the bottom of a giardia-ridden, putrid river.  The vocals spit and snarl, with drummer Henrick B.C, guitarist Thomas F. J and bassist Daniel A all taking turns vomiting up bilious buckets of bile.  There's no polish to the production, and at times the guitars will be compressed way down and the pounding of the bass will push through, but for the most part there's no real discerning what aural ear-rape is happening at any given time.  That is, except for Henrick B. C's utterly insane, off-kilter drumming.  If there's anything that really separates DEIQUISITOR from the pile of rotting bodies littering today's modern death metal scene, it's his frenetic, borderline improvisational percussion. The cymbals sound like instruments of torture- a splash here, as if a chain has been pulled just a bit tighter; a crash that sounds as if demons have burst through the concrete walls of a church; a ride hit with such ferocity and speed it sounds like the heart of a dying banshee. The kick drums roll and pummel; the snare pops and stabs like the brutal thrust of a broadsword. It's psychedelic drumming that lifts the sludgy, sloppy, punkish death metal song-writing into a realm of relentless mind-fucking.  It's the last trip on the top of an abandoned warehouse in a hot, soulless summer.  DEQUISITOR has come to rip your head off and force you to see the world through its own eyes, to reach an apotheosis of being that elevates you to the last single human on Earth, before being dragged down to the bowels of hell.

There's no particular song that stands out, but that's not a criticism.  This is a wall of sound, punctuated with small, deliberate gestures of psychopathy: the atonal clean guitar at the end of opener "Humanoid" or the double vocals that paint the closing song "Praise the Lord" with a sacrilegious sneer. For the past ten years, DEQUISITOR has been doing its death metal thing out of Denmark and slowly establishing a name for itself in the brutally competitive world of today's death metal.  "Apotheosis" is the sound of a band taking its last trip to the abominable abyss, and we're all going to get dragged along, whether you want to or not.