Label: Iron Fortress Records
Release date: March 14th, 2025
California is one of these states in the USA, which every entire metalhead worldwide associates with our beloved music. This is of course because of several metal gods, extremely prominent bands who everyone knows and, at least in my opinion it can’t be otherwise, love. But in fact, California’s scene is much bigger, full of ensembles who are totally unknown for, let’s call it, average fans. Depraver is one of them, I think. At least I never heard even a word about them. And they exist for quite a long time, because their date of birth is 2012. The same year, to be precise September 5th, they released their debut cassette EP entitled “A Crippling Crush”. But then some, as I strongly suppose, some shits happened, because they had a long five years’ pause with phonographic activities. Well, the same thing, but this time it was “only” four years, was after releasing a split with another California’s ensemble Vrenth.
Anyway, the most important thing here is they came back with their debut album, released independently online, on a portal I referred to many times, and by Iron Fortress Records both as a CD and a cassette March 14th. And this is actually good news for all of us who like such creativity. The fact is “Necrocryptic Obliteration” isn’t anything edge-cutting, but at the same time that’s a very solid full-length and the band present very good quality. Honestly, all those released by the above-mentioned label I heard, all of them wait in line to be reviewed and it’ll take a little time before I do it, are like that. Ok, but let’s focus on Depraver and the music they play. I already said this is quite a highly qualified one, but you still have no idea, of course if you didn’t find this online and listen to it, what our metal sister and brothers play. Well, some of you, I mean the ones who’re maniacs with many years of experience under their belt, surely have some “suspect” sub-genre or maybe even a few ones. And if you associate both the ensemble’s logo and the cover-art with broadly understood old school death/thrash metal, then you’re generally right. Generally, because this is, as always, a little more complicated. You know, there are some influences of, for example black metal as well. I know that on the portal where you can find basic facts about ensembles coming from all over the world the description is another. But in my opinion, it’s not exactly what we’re able to listen to on “Necrocryptic…”.
Album contains eight tracks taking almost, without seven seconds, forty-four minutes. So, as you can see, songs aren’t too long, even if they have various lengths – shortest one is four minutes and forty seconds and longest – seven minutes and fourteen seconds, and not too short. What takes music itself, it’s technically advanced and in middle tempo. Riffs are both broken and aggressive as well, they also change quite often. Of course, what’s in my opinion something obvious when we’re talking about such creativity, we’re dealing with several guitar tricks here and there. The same can be said about drumming. I mean, there’s maybe not some super developed passages, but they take place often instead. And, what makes music more complex and interesting as well, Jake treats cymbals as a very important part of drums, and uses it almost all the time. Anyway, it’s not too easy in the case of Depraver to clearly indicate some specific school of playing death metal. I mean, you can hear influences of both American, European and even Brazilian bands. But if I’d need to list, of course indirectly, some of them, to make it easier for you to get to know what you should expect from this album, I associate this creativity with, then it was probably Anglo-Saxon gods of death metal who released such masterpieces as for example “Serpent Temptation”, “After the Battle”, “Illusions” or “The Sins of Mankind”.
“Necrocryptic Obliteration” isn’t maybe on the same level, but at the same time music’s quality is really high. To sum up, that’s one more item every fan mentioned, a few times before the genre must have. This is further proof of the absurdity of the thesis that ensembles formed after 2000 had nothing interesting to offer.
