Review by Sonny for Diabolic Oath - Oracular Hexations (2024)

Diabolic Oath are seemingly a secretive three-piece from Portland with members named Chthonian Incursor, Ominous Void and The Temple, none of whose roles within the band are public knowledge. According to their Bandcamp page they use completely fretless guitars and a simultaneous triple vocal attack "to depredate the listener's psyche", so I think it is fair to say that we are not in melodic metal territory here. What we do have is a blackened death metal assault that is very close to war metal, in fact the first couple of tracks are very much in the vein of true war metal, with the cavernous, noisy and chaotic aesthetic of true war metal sitting very much to the fore. That isn't the totality of what is going in with Oracular Hexations, however, as the band explore a multifarious number of ways to achieve metallic extremity, even within these opening two tracks. As the initial war metal assault subsides, the latter half of opener "Rusted Madness Tethering Misbegotten Haruspices" takes on an almost tribal-sounding, hulking chug of a riff, and the second, "Serpent Coils Suffocating the Mortal Wound" at one point employs a weird, almost out-of-tune gothic rock guitar lick alongside the more usual disso-death guitar work.

Diabolic Oath lean towards the death metal end of the war metal spectrum and after these initial couple of tracks the death metal aspect dominates the album, with the blackened side mainly being represented by some of the vocals. "Winged Ouroboros Mutating Unto Gold", for example has an old-school feeling to it that hints at death doom, albeit noisier and more chaotic than, say, Autopsy, but displaying a similar approach to death metal. In a similar way, "Fragmented Hymns From the Globulous Cruciger" feels rooted in tech-death, but you have to take into accout the cavernous, noisy production of the album and dig in a bit to appreciate the more technical and tighter guitar and percussion work utilised here.

Each of these first four tracks clock in between four and five minutes, but the final couple are much longer affairs, with next track, "Gathering Hordes From the Outer Worlds" running for almost ten minutes and the closer, "Oracular Hexations Leeching", just over eight. These longer, final two tracks tend to veer between looming and ominous doominess and sheer unmitigated violence and actually constitute my favourite part of the album. A healthy serving of death doom metal is always likely to garner a thumbs-up from me and the way that it is interspersed by blastbeat-driven, outbursts of violent, high-tempo death metal makes for a very satisfying mix.

I have to confess that, for me, this wasn't an immediate attention-grabber, with my initial listen-through being a somewhat underwhelming affair as the dissonance and chaos overwhelmed me a little and found me starting to drift away, but this, certainly for me at least, is a release that rewards persistence. Once I got to grips with the noisy production and the trappings of the technical and dissonant aspects and got them lined up in my mind then it became much easier to appreciate the quality of what Diabolic Oath were attempting (and pulling off) here. That, I think, is to produce a real bamboozling piece of extreme metal that has the feeling of a chaotic and loose headlong charge, but which is, in fact, a highly controlled, tightly written and technically adept slab of extremity that explores the ominousness of threat and danger in contrast to the sheer explosive brutality of violence. Whether that is an apt interpretation or not, either way, this is an impressive and thought-provoking chunk of metal that certainly deserves more attention than it has currently been receiving.