Hypocrisy - Osculum Obscenum (1993)^{Release ID: 5172}

Hypocrisy's debut album Penetralia, while being a slightly immature release, showed good potential that this Swedish band could one day create some seriously good death metal. I had high hopes that Osculum Obscenum might be the point where they began to make that prediction a reality, but I have to say it hasn't quite done enough for me to call it an essential album. It is however an improvement over Penetralia in a few areas, particularly when it comes to the riffs and certainly worth checking out for anyone into straight forward death metal.

The lyrics and vocals are still a bit cheesy with Masse really sounding like he's forcing his vocal chords to do things they just aren't capable of. When he growls, he's decent enough but when he screams it just sounds a bit crap to my ears. While I'm complaining I must state that the leads are not up to scratch either. Check out the solo on Exclamation of a Necrofag for an example of how dodgy they are. But even with all this negativity, I do enjoy the album. The riffs are dark and chunky, the drumming is more than adequate, and the overall atmosphere is where it should be.

Hypocrisy would get much, much better than this. As enjoyable as it is, it's all a bit derivative and the genre was moving ahead in leaps and bounds during the period when this was released. I think I've always enjoyed the band when they are more epic and melodic, rather than albums like this where creativity takes a back seat to pure brutality and darkness. There are bands that do that better! Highlights for me are Pleasure for Molestation, Osculum Obscenum and Inferior Devoties.

I first became exposed to Swedish death metallers Hypocrisy through their 1992 debut album "Penetralia" after noticing a cassette copy floating around Neuropath front man Mark Wangmann's house in early 1993 & I have to admit that I quite enjoyed it too although I wouldn't suggest that it's essential listening by any means. My recent revisit to that particular record has proven that I probably gave it a little more attention than it deserved at the time though because I seemed to recall most of the song-writing pretty vividly. I'd subsequently pick up a dubbed copy of Hypocrisy's sophomore album "Osculum Obscenum" through one of my metal connections shortly afterwards & found it to offer a very similar level of reward although I can't say that I can recall this material anywhere near as much as "Penetralia" which is an indicator that I moved on from it fairly quickly. This is perhaps not all that surprising when you consider that "Osculum Obscenum" is basically more of the same brand of meat-&-potatoes death metal that Hypocrisy had dished up on their earlier effort with the limited technical skills that tainted my view of "Penetralia" still being on full display here. The riff construction is pretty standard for a third tier death metal player while the drumming & lead guitar work showcase a level of naivety that the band was still yet to overcome. I find the poorly executed blast beats to be a bit of a distraction as poor old Lars Szöke simply can't keep them in time for more than a couple of bars so they end up resembling a train crash by the end of those sections due to his lack of endurance. There's no doubt that Hypocrisy knew a good hook when they heard one though so there's still plenty to enjoy here.

Although "Osculum Obscenum" is of a pretty similar standard to "Penetralia", I do tend to favour the debut just slightly over it. "Penetralia" definitely contained a couple more highlight tracks than "Osculum Obscenum" but it also fell flat a little more regularly so there's a bit of give & take there. At the end of the day though, the fact that I can recall the songs from "Penetralia" more vividly than those from their follow-up is the telling factor in me placing "Osculum Obscenum" slightly behind "Penetralia" in respect to the overall Hypocrisy back catalogue. The band would go on to produce better records than both of these crude early works but I'd suggest that both are still worth a few spins for the any self-respecting Swedish death metal devotee.

For fans of Bloodbath, Dismember & early Edge of Sanity.