Drumroll please! Glorious Depravity returns after two years to bring their critically-acclaimed project "Death Never Sleeps" to live via Transcending Obscurity Records on November 7th. John, Chris, George, Matt, and Doug's old-school death metal is the last thing to get swept under the death metal rug, as Qobuz's magazine awarded it as one of the four best metal albums of the month of November for it's brutality and technicality, and many reviewers and blogs echo. For me, this will be my first encounter with them, but the general consensus has already given me some hype. It's now time for Glorious Depravity, (named after Ripping Corpse's 1990 demo), to prove that the praise is apparent.

A formidable duo of singles escaped hell to present themselves to us before the full project released, the first of which was "The Devouring Dust," released August 25th. The immediate pummeling drums and loud riffs are enough to send a Victorian-era child into a coma. They. Just. Don't. Stop. Two vocal styles are present; classic gutturals and some higher-register screeches. A blistering solo and a barrage of blast beats later, I finish quite exhausted. The second single is the topically religious (the norm, by now) "Slaughter the Gerontocrats." A gerontocracy, for those as clueless as I was, is a government run exclusively by old people. And we have to slaughter them! The band goes into great detail into their plans and feelings about how to do so - always great to open up. My ears got opened up, too. This track is just as brutal as the last, and is solid in composition. No dragging on, no boring parts, no time to futz around. I hear some gurglely slam metal vocals thrown in, and the groove gets occasionally broken up by guitar solos sent from The Flash himself. Well, actually it comes from George or Matt.

The full album opens with the aforementioned single, and we start to get into the meat of the LP. The brutally-named "Stripmined Flesh Extractor," (whatever the hell that is), breaks through flow of songs, a noticeable pattern. The song introduces the more groovy riffs, and ends off with some warped spoken word message... "Fleshkills Poltergeist" is up next. Headbang-able, stank face-able, etc. The technicality that's spat out at every track so far is admirable - I almost feel proud for some reason. The song fades out quite calmly, since the duration of the track was filled to the brim with ferocious instrumentation and demonically-delivered lyrics. Like the rest of them! The easily-named "Sulprous Winds (Howling Through Christendom)" comes in, cymbals a-crashin'. The repeated lyrics such as "silence" allows for some memorability, if the song title didn't already give it some. The track is shorter than most, but it does what it needs to do and leaves with it's mark stamped in your ears. The other book-length song titled song comes next, that being "Scourged by the Wings of the Fell Destroyer." The guitars start to take on some extra technicality here, but the distortion makes sure to silence them after a while. I remember noting the religious lyrical topics, and they haven't ceased yet. False prophets, the Lord, all that jazz. A twenty-second outro finishes it off. "Carnage at the Margins" acts as another vessel of Glorious Depravity's modern twist on the OSDM sound, and so does "Necrobiotic Enslavement." The last track, and the longest to boot, is the album-titled "Death Never Sleeps." This is one of the slower songs, as it seems to focus more on creating a dreary atmosphere. The banshee screams are present in the song, and pair perfectly with the plodding set of instruments. "Death Never Sleeps," the song and the full album, ends shortly after.

I can only have so many gripes with this album. I would like to hear the bass more, as I really couldn't discern it in big portions of the overall work. I'd also want some more variety in song structure and sound, but it's OSDM. The band never really dips into the brutal death metal or the technical death metal genre enough to be coined as such, but I do appreciate "Death Never Sleeps" greatly.