Ulcerate - The Destroyers Of All

(17 Apr 2011)

I really don't understand the Internet sometimes. It seems that people are/have become really impatient when it comes to music, what with them rating and reviewing albums after a first listen. The result of this is predictable: unjustified extreme negativity towards albums that are actually really good. Do people fear to take their time with albums? I just don't understand it. I start to get the impression that people like being disappointed with albums, because sounding witty and all knowing is much easier when panning something. Take The King of Limbs, for example. I haven't heard it yet, but I remember once looking it up here on RYM and every single review on a whole page was giving the album 0.5 stars, and that was about a day or two after its Internet release. I read the reviews, and did I learn anything about the album? No. They were just the sort of things you'd write jokingly after listening to an album once, determined to give it a 0.5 rating because you hate fans of the artist.

The reason for this rant is the way people tend to judge bands' newer albums based on how their older ones were. This means that if a band releases one specially good album, people will judge all of their next albums by comparing them with that one really good album. It's a really easy and quick way to have an opinion on a release, but it is biased to the point that it can be ridiculously unfair. I think that is what happened with The Destroyers of All. It is a grower, yet people already started rating it about days after it was leaked/streamed/I have no idea what happened, and based their opinion by comparing it with the near-classic Everything Is Fire. This release is very different in approach, so the result was that people didn't appear to like it much. I say that, of the two, this is probably my favorite (I haven't listened to their debut yet).

With TDoA, Ulcerate have evolved a lot. The music is more atmospheric and textural, there are less riffs, but they're all keepers. The songwriting has had a huge improvement, there is a much better sense of pace and a much better balance. The problem I had with EiF is still here, in that the first two songs are quite forgettable, but after that, specially starting with "The Hollow Idols", this album just gets better and better. "Omens" is one of the most depressive and bleak pieces of music I've ever heard and is probably my favorite song by Ulcerate, even better than "Caecus", and "Cold Becoming" isn't far behind.

So, like I said, this evolves on the right aspects to make an album even better than an already fantastic one. Is it better because of the change in sound, though? Probably not. The sound pursued here gets quite boring after a while. What really makes it so good is the improvement in terms of songwriting. I think that if Ulcerate regress to the sound on their sophomore and join it with the sense of balance and excellent songwriting presented here, they will beget a masterpiece. For now, though, I'll wait for the masterpiece.

Standout tracks:

Cold Becoming
The Hollow Idols
Omens
The Destroyers Of All