Virulent Depravity – Fruit of the Poisoned Tree (Review)

Virulent Depravity are a technical death metal band from the US and this is their debut album.

Who doesn’t love some head-turning dizzying techdeath now and again?

Although the album cover is quite classic death metal in many ways, this is definitely of the ultra-modern death metal school. It’s state-of-the-art, and should easily appeal to fans of bands like The Zenith Passage, Spawn of Possession, Gorod, First Fragment, Omnihility and Origin.

With some superb displays of musicianship, Fruit of the Poisoned Tree racks up technical achievement after technical achievement as these tracks blur by. They key to being good at this kind of thing though, is to combine the technical wizardry with a skill at crafting actual songs of some sort – Virulent Depravity achieve this too, writing songs with complex structures and layouts that nonetheless satisfy the listener’s need for some kind of order, no matter how chaotically imposed.

Progressive and technical melodies flow with ease, and even though the majority of the album is blisteringly fast, they do know how to take the foot off the accelerator now and again.

There’s a good amount of variety here too. Different speeds and ideas are explored, including keyboards, multiple vocal styles, and the always-necessary hyper-fast blast beats. I also enjoy a lot of the more atypical riffs that they employ.

Not content with doing all of this on their own, there’s a plethora of guests across the album supplying keyboards, vocals and so many solos that the album is positively swimming in them. As I have a fondness for solos, this is a very good thing. In some ways, the entire album is one huge guitarfest, but that shouldn’t minimise the incredible playing of the drums or bass though.

The band enjoy a crystal clear sound too, so you can hear absolutely everything that’s going on. The bass makes an important contribution to albums like this, so it’s great that this coming through loud and clear when it needs to.

Fruit of the Poisoned Tree is one of the more impressive and dazzling technical death metal albums to be released of late. Make sure you don’t miss it.