Release year: 2024
Label: Xtreem Music

Christ Denied is one of the many projects of Dave Rotten, whose perhaps best known band is Avulsed, whose Extraterrestrial Carnage ep we reviewed recently (click). Rotten also runs Xtreem Music, the label behind this release and a whole slew of other releases we’ve reviewed.

With a history reaching back all the way to 1994, the fact that Christopsy is only Christ Denied’s third full-length album reveals that it’s very much a side hustle. But I suppose running a highly active label besides leading one of the pioneers of Spanish death metal and having a slew of other bands means some acts can’t get all that much attention.

On to Christopsy. Maybe some of you suspected a nod towards Cryptopsy? If you did, you we’re right on the money: the promo sheet indeed confirms, that this whole album is a tribute to the Canadian legends.

And I suppose you can hear it in the music as well. To be honest, I’ve never cared much for Cryptopsy, so knowing this is the Spaniards’ “Cryptopsy album” didn’t really knock my socks off. It’s not on the nose at all, though: most of the time listening to this, I didn’t even remember the “Cryptopsy link”. I just enjoyed some good brutal death metal.

Because that’s what this is: good, solid, brutal death metal. Guitars tuned low, guttural vocals going even lower, except when they shriek like squealing pigs. Slow fist banging sections mix with faster sections of neck breaking headbanging. Furiously sawing riffs alternating with the chugging riffs of the slower sections.

Yeah, there’s Cryptopsy in the mix, but that’s scarcely surprising for a brutal death metal album anno 2024, is it? Name your other favourite influential brutal death metal acts, and I’m sure you can spot something borrowed from them as well.

Which, as you probably guessed, means that there’s nothing original on Christopsy. This is a pretty run-of-the-mill brutal death metal album. One of those meat-and-potatoes albums – but in a prevailingly good sense; this is the solid backbone of the genre, from which those truly luminous albums spring up from.

If you’re a ravenous fan of neanderthal brutal death metal, look no further. On Christopsy, Christ Denied offer up an unoriginal and somewhat derivative, but first and foremostly very solid piece of just that. And, of course, make their antichristian stance known in just about every way, including the copious amounts of speech samples utilized between tracks.

This is not one of those albums that’s going to go down in the annals of death metal history as a classic. But I don’t think it really strives to be one of that few number, either. To me Christopsy sounds like a bunch of guys just wanted to hammer out some good ole heavy as fuck death metal – originality or too much ambition be damned. And that’s what they did. And that’s what endears me to this album.

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