Band:	Defeated Sanity
Album:	Chronicles Of Lunacy
Style:	Brutal death metal
Release date:	November 22, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Amputationsdrang
02. The Odour Of Sanctity
03. Accelerating The Rot
04. Temporal Disintegration
05. Extrinsically Enraged
06. A Patriarchy Perverse
07. Condemned To Vascular Famine
08. Heredity Violated

How many times can you create a inhumanly complex brutal death metal album?

I'll start by saying that, for the past 30 years, Defeated Sanity have been one of the most consistent and boundary pushing of the technical / brutal death metal bands, and while they weren't the first, a lot of the bands that put this oppressive technicality as a musical priority owe their dues to the late jazz musician Wolfgang Teske forming a death metal band with his sons in the early 90s. Nowadays only drummer son Lille Gruber is still in the band from the familial origins of the band, and the only one to have performed on Prelude To The Tragedy and still be in the band. A stable lineup has always eluded the band, evidenced by the fact that the band switched guitarists since the last record, thus making Chronicles Of Lunacy Vaughn Stoffey's first with the band.

I did call the band boundary pushing, because for a long time it did feel like each subsequent album was one-upping the previous in some way. Notable ones include Disposal Of The Dead / Dharmata essentially being a double album deconstruction of the band's sound into a more technical and a more brutal part; and The Sanguinary Impetus being described as "Frank Zappa writing a brutal death metal album" in our review. Even so, the band has been very consistent about what their sound is, their albums being structured around being around 30 minutes in runtime (except for the aforementioned double-ish album), leading to pretty knowing what you're gonna get with a Defeated Sanity record. And the landscape around Defeated Sanity has had its landscape pushed as well (making that boundary pushing nature feel more muted), and part of that push has come as a result of one musician/producer.

It's rare these days to talk about a brutal / tech death metal album without getting to mention Colin Marston, a name I've gotten to mention already in so many reviews, and what would you guess, he produced this album as well! Turns out The Sanguinary Impetus was also graced by his hand, but compared to that record, Chronicles Of Lunacy was recorded in a single record, thus the list of engineers is reduced to solely Marston, leading to the album's cohesive feel. Even with their established sound, whose impact is less cacophonous or suffocating, but more mesmerizingly intricate, pushed to the boundary without feeling ridiculous while at it, in a way that makes me feel that I should grab a Thesaurus in order for my writing to even match the verbosity and intricacies in this record's music. It's easy to see these as just exercises, and that's something that did feel like a barrier on The Sanguinary Impetus, but the flow of Chronicles Of Lunacy blends the slammier sections and the more avant-garde technical aspects into songs whose flows are easier to follow and decipher.

I don't think Chronicles Of Lunacy will convince people that haven't already been convinced by the band's past album, or by the subgenre in general. The ones that are though, will find plenty to dig into.