The Swedish trio that dug the graves of the 1990s came back in 2009 to count the bodies, and A Taste of Extreme Divinity is the tally. Recorded, mixed and produced by Peter Tägtgren in his own Abyss studio, work the booklet dates to December 2008 though vocals were still being recorded in April 2009, mastered by Jonas Kjellgren at Black Lounge and loosed on Europe by Nuclear Blast on 23 October 2009, with North America following on 3 November, the eleventh full-length does not march into new territory at all, because the three men behind the Abyss desk spent that winter and spring prying open every grave the band had dug since the 1990s, sorting the bones by era and stacking them on the shelves in strict order. It is an ossuary. A well lit one.
The lineage is short and legible. When the band reissued a re-recorded Catch-22 in May 2008, it conceded, in an update published by Blabbermouth on 21 April 2009, that the 2002 original "got slammed and misunderstood because of the vocal style and the drum sound"; Virus in 2005 had already dragged Hypocrisy back to the dissection table, and this record finishes the dragging. The studio line-up is a trio: Tägtgren on vocals and guitar, Mikael Hedlund on bass, and Horgh, the Immortal drummer Reidar Horghagen, behind the kit, with the second guitar chair left empty since the departure of Andreas Holma. Kristian Wåhlin, the painter who signs as Necrolord, supplied the sleeve. The band's own brief, in that same April 2009 update, issued while vocals were still being cut between Pain tours, was stated without ornament: the album would not be rushed, "because this album is going to be the best we've ever done!"
The shelves are arranged with a cataloguer's discipline. "Valley of the Damned" opens on a thrash gallop and a darker, lower growl, the death metal of Virus picked up exactly where it had been set down, and the growl stays in front from the first bar to the last, with no clean chorus of the Catch-22 kind anywhere in the running order. "Solar Empire" is where the melodic inheritance shows its hand, a chorus built to be roared back from the floor and a guitar line that lodges in the memory like a splinter of bone in a boot heel. It also states the law that rules all eleven songs. However thick the blasting gets, a melody is never more than a few bars away, ready to haul the song back up into the light.
Then the slaughter line. "Weed Out the Weak", three minutes and fifty seconds long and picked for the video that Denis Goria directed and the band released on 23 April 2010, is the bluntest instrument in the charnel house: Horgh's blast beats run with the indifferent regularity of a bone saw on a conveyor, the riffs grind the verses down to gristle, and still the guitar melody arrives, stitched across the carcass like a surgeon's suture. "Taste the Extreme Divinity" digs deeper still, three and a half minutes of barrage in which the record bares its teeth hardest.
The other wing of the ossuary holds the epics. "No Tomorrow" and "Global Domination" carry the expansive mid-tempo of the 1999 self-titled album, marched rather than sprinted, "Global Domination" built as an anthem for a crowd with its fists in the air, while "The Quest" rises out of a majestic introduction and settles into a groove. These are the epics the record was built around, and on the whole they earn their length. The North American mail-order edition adds a bonus track, "The Sinner", together with 2008 demos of "Valley of the Damned" and the title track; none of it alters the inventory.
The production is the contested ground: a single slab of guitars that can sound like the heaviest masonry ever poured at the Abyss, laid over drums that lean hard on their triggers and a top end that thins under pressure. The triggers are real and so is the slab, and the slab wins, because a record built on blasting of this tempo needs a kick drum that cuts through the wall rather than drowning in it. The true limit lies elsewhere, written into the design itself. An ossuary preserves; it does not grow. Every corridor of this record had been walked before, by this band, on records the eleven songs openly descend from, and not one of them stands beside the classics it was assembled from. Every bone is in its right drawer, and not one of them is new.
Every bone is in its right drawer, and not one of them is new.
The numbers recorded the reception with a librarian's indifference. The album entered the German chart at No. 62, the Austrian at No. 66 and the French at No. 184, and in the United States it moved about 1,400 copies in its first week to reach No. 23 on Billboard's Top New Artist Albums, an eleventh album filed among the newcomers, which is its own small irony. The North American tour in support of Ensiferum, for which Children of Bodom's Alexi Laiho had been hired to fill the empty guitar chair, stalled on US work visas on the very day of the American release and was cancelled on 17 November 2009. The record had to carry itself.
It does. A Taste of Extreme Divinity is the most complete single map of what Hypocrisy had been across the 1990s and the early 2000s, the abattoir and the anthem filed side by side with no residue of the experiments that preceded Virus, and the fan who walked away at Catch-22 will find here the record that should have followed the self-titled album. Those who wanted the band to break new ground in 2009 will find a cataloguer instead of an explorer, and a cataloguer of rare rigour. The shelves hold.