Immolation - Failures for Gods (1999)Release ID: 643
After the incredible Here in After, I was prepared for Failures for Gods to similarly break my spine and send me to a place of misanthropic misery where no god can touch me. I was ready for twisted riffs to fill me with infernal black flames and ravage my soul while the drums mimicked the beatdown of an unworthy god. That triumphant album cover of the devil gazing upon his subjects was the final piece.
Perhaps I expected too much. For somewhere between the two albums, Immolation seems to have lost something key. By rights, the music is expertly played. The drumming is inhuman, the songwriting is interesting, the vocals slay. On its own, it’s a great album. But this is essentially a strong Tech/Dissodeath influenced Death Metal album… not the follow up to one of the greatest albums in that genre ever.
Trying to put my finger on what’s missing here, it’s the memorability. Despite being highly Dissodeath influenced, Here in After featured some incredibly memorable riffs, often repeating their strongest, catchiest riffs multiple times in order for you to latch onto something amidst the brutal chaos, leaving each song memorable and strong. Failures for Gods… just doesn’t have that. I can’t remember a single riff off the album.
And that’s pretty par for the course when it comes to Dissodeath, but it goes to show why Here in After is a whole other breed. Failures for Gods is a great album that is sure to satisfy fans of the genre. But as a follow up to one of the greatest albums by one of the greatest bands in that style, you could call it a… “Failure.”
Normally a guaranteed win with anything I discovered by them, Failures for Gods has always been the exception to the rule for me with Immolation's otherwise fantastic discography. With only Alex Hernandez new in post, the same line up that produced Dawn of Possession and Here In After somehow managed to go off the boil with album number three. I will call out early in the review that although Hernandez is a fantastic drummer, his performance on this record is dubious and suffers from some mistiming on top of a poor mix and production that makes the drums sound too wet and tepid. His perfomance on Failures for Gods is nowhere near the level of confidence that is obvious on the follow up to this record, Close To A World Below (my favourite Immolation album).
To be clear though, the let downs on this album are not all down to Alex. Paul Orofino does little to help the band with a production job that sounds murky and claustrophic. Guitars sound stifled, as if struggling to find space to fill with their angular sound. The clicky sound to the drums does nothing to help this sense of confinement and in the end, only Dolan's vocals get anything like the attention they should in the mix. Again, this problem did not persist when Orofino continued to produce Immolation albums for the next few releases so I suspect that Failures for Gods was his first death metal production job (or one of his first at least) and so he had quickly learned his trade come the next album.
This album is full of the trademark Immolation attack coming straight out of the traps with the monstrous Once Ordained making the bands intentions clear enough on track one. But a few of the tracks on here feel cumbersome in nature with that familiar shifting sound becoming more of a lurch, certainly without a consistent sounding percussive backdrop to shape and guide it at least. The threat of the melodic and lead work of the guitar is all but tamed in the grander scheme of things, sounding more monotone than menacing. Thankfully little more than a blip on the discography, Failures for Gods is cursed by a tired production job and some lack of focus on all details and is an album that I rarley visit as a result.
