While it may be obvious to any music fan that variety is important on any album, it may not be as obvious that the difference between an exciting album and a monotonous one can be traced to small details. One does not have to use long complex song forms and influences from eight different genres to make an album sound varied; Reign in Blood is pretty much all straightforward no-holds-barred thrashing, but seemingly minor things like tempo differences, changes in feel, and different rhythmic accents keep your attention focused on the music and prevent it from getting boring.
The lack of small differentiating details is where Deathcult’s The Test of Time falls short. The riffs are strong, the performances – all done by sole bandmember Tim Pearson, with a few guest leads from Scott Wright – are tight, the production strikes a good balance between being raw and clear, but everything just feels the same.
Deathcult play blackened thrash/speed metal, similar in nature to Abigail/Gospel of the Horns/Toxic Holocaust. I could draw comparisons to the black ‘n roll sound of later-era Satyricon, but Deathcult manages to be much more convincing in their delivery than Satyricon are. Later Satyricon is just flat-out lame, whereas Deathcult is at its core actually sounds like solid black metal.
The passion for the music is definitely there. Unfortunately, it suffers from a creatively limited palette, leading to an album that could be awesome but is instead same-y and not that interesting. The songs hover around the same tempo and have mostly the same feel throughout, and when your music is straightforward and to-the-point, you need to vary those things more to make the album work.
Most of the lack of variety can be traced to the drumming. Pearson is a rhythmically solid drummer, but outside of a few scattered blast beats and flourishes, every song has the same basic rock beat feel, a problem that is exacerbated by the lack of variety in tempo. Had there been some faster or slower songs, it would have broken up the monotony. Throw in some d-beats or triplet-feel songs, and now you have a much more multifaceted album that is much more interesting to listen to.
And all of these flaws are very, very easy to fix on future material. Tim Pearson can literally just rip drum beats from Discharge, Slayer, and Iron Maiden, and keep the quality of the riffs the same, and the next album will automatically be an improvement over The Test of Time. The base of the material is solid, and some very basic changes could make Deathcult a band to keep an eye on.
