Despised Icon - 'Day Of Mourning'

One of the few quality deathcore bands, Despised Icon entertains with sufficient brutality and energy, but their latest effort is hindered by its abundance of filler material.

Frowned upon by many longtime underground metalheads, the deathcore subgenre isn’t without a few bands that actually matter. One such band is Despised Icon, an act that bridges brutal American-styled death metal with metallic Hatebreed-esque hardcore, unlike “death core” bands that merely fuse commercialized metalcore with pseudo death metal and token growling vocals. Day Of Mourning highlights another reason why they’re the cream of the crop: the increased use of melodies within their brutal riffing.

And with album number four, their ever-increasing proficiency has yet to plateau. Their sharpened tools have led to face-slicing shredders like “MVP,” “Les Temps Changent,” and “Entre Le Bien Et Le Mal,” a track highlighting the kind of tremulous quick-picking grind that would probably win over some old school death and grind heads—the ones who aren’t worried about the reaction of scene policemen, that is.

But as with every Despised Icon release, Day Of Mourning includes too much filler. They’d probably be better off writing shorter EPs eschewing throw-away material like the meandering slow sections of the otherwise impressive aforementioned track “Entre Le Bien Et Le Mal.” And the ironically-entitled album-closer, “Sleepless,” a dragging acoustic number, may as well be a prescription for insomnia.

And paradoxically, their reputable trait of making drastic shifts within songs has become too formulaic (“Diva of Disgust” is far too reflective of their relative hit “In the Arms of Perdition”). Day Of Mourning is not as ambitious or truly varied enough as one might expect or want of a band as talented as Despised Icon, yet their finer selections certainly are enjoyable enough to merit repeated listens.