Deicide – Legion (1992)

Deicide’s second full length effort “Legion” is an album which I grew to like very quickly and it even propelled itself into one of my favorite albums. This, at first, came from the sheer lunacy that rages within each performance and aspect of this album, as each exceptional piece of extreme music includes and requires over the top performances only achievable through collective tunnel vision and the artist’s strong desire to fully express his own vision. 

It was also quickly realized that this album undeniably holds more than “just sick riffs and writing”, as obsessive listens of individual constellations, riffs and lyrical phrases made it avid that Legion might be one of the very few albums completely conceptualizing and realizing the construct “Death Metal”, despite the approach to lyrical topics and riff craft being one dimensional. Only at first.

Combining the pristine, calculated and streamlined with the barbaric, chaotic and unpredictable. 

For the uninitiated, Legion is barbaric at best. High tempos dominate the songs as grunted vocals with a remaining human touch shout obscene lyrics, creating the initial sound of this record. Upon further inspection one realises those riffs are also designed in a very chromatic and mechanic way, as there is not much derivation allowed within this framework. The barbaric suddenly becomes pristine, even robotic as the motifs are executed at light speeds and diverge in very minimalistic steps, almost as each and every repetition of a riff adds more weight and tension to a song.

This enables the calculated and streamlined to be fully explored in these compositions. The calculated is exemplified through the previous realization that riffs shape towards a greater goal, each mutation adds another brick leading to a greater climax. This approach is very streamlined especially with Deicide building upon a very limited tonal foundation, yet they excel at making each of these building blocks more spectacular as  its’ predecessor. This proves a barbaric trade of not holding back but also a pristine characteristic of reaching towards perfection, which in Deicide’s case assumably means complete aggression and relentlessnes within both music and lyrics. 

After realizing how these songs work and why they work this way, one could assume that a climax must be predictable, a derivation of things heard before, like in any good Death Metal. Deicide works around this and most likely peaks a composition with an unheard Riff, see Dead But Dreaming or Trifixion, before abruptly removing all tension and excitement through slight variations and re-arrangements of previous motifs, giving us the sensation of fulfillment by throwing known parts at us, making the songs feel even more compact and tight. The predictable becomes unpredictable but contrary to life, the unpredictable satisfies the listener within the songs as each climax is integrated very carefully and only if previous elements have been fully explored with tunnel vision and no restraint.

Deicide is often cited as one of the most influential Death Metal Bands, but it’s very unlikely to find a Band mimicking, let alone attempting to construct songs in the vein of Legion, as this a fully concentrated, direct and clear statement and proves Death Metal to be more of an abstract, expressive artform than just something that at first glance excels through calculated lunacy.

As I smear my blood on thy sword
Through the gates into lands I know not
On the road where none have returned
Come to life, Oh lords of black earth