Testimony Of The Ancients

When I said to the Metal Reviews team that I wanted to review Pestilence's masterpiece Testimony Of The Ancients, I asked my teammates what they thought about that record and if I they considered it to be a classic. One of the team members told me there was no reason to add it as a classic. I still consider it as a major death metal release, but he repied that he listened to it about a month ago and although it was a good album, he didn't see what the big deal was honestly, and that I was the only person to ever say that. I understood his point of view, but I answered him that he had to put himself back to the year of its release in 1991. This album, recorded at Morrisound Recording, when the place still was the Mecca of death metal, was a major release at the time with its classical and jazz influences, and a giant step further for the band after the release of the bestial Consuming Impulse. I enjoyed the brutality of Consuming Impulse, but I enjoy this one even more for the ponderous, unhealthy atmosphere hanging over the whole album, although it is probably one of the clearest death metal albums ever produced. The band couldn't move onto a more brutal level and they searched to gain in intensity rather than in brutality. They came up with the lyrical concept of the ancient ones, and each track, cut with an interlude, tells its own story but all are linked together. The songs are longer, more progressive and less chaotic than on Consuming Impulse. I have always wondered what this album would have sounded like if Martin Van Drunnen had never left the band. His vocal performance on Consuming Impulse was guttural, throwing out sentences as if he had the devil in his mouth. I have always regretted his departure, but now listening to this album 13 years after its release, I have to admit his vocals would be totally out of place on this record. Instead, Patrick Mameli's vocal duties are the perfect ones for this album, for although his voice remains aggressive all through the entire course of the album, it flows with the music as if the music had been composed after the recording of the vocal lines. The bass was handled on this record by Atheist's Tony Choy, but here it's the guitar work that is simply amazing. I bet if I were a guitar player myself I would be find challenging those incredible guitar solos and lead riffs and the overall epic riffs on this album which remains one of the best among the technical death metal albums along with those of Atheist and Cynic. For the first time, the band integrated keyboards into their music, and they were clever not to have them too predominant. Pestilence reached a higher level with this album. The band returned a couple of years later with Spheres, an album that showed another step forwards into jazz experimentation, but a step to far for the audience. The result was indeed very disappointing and lead the band to stop all activities. From today's standpoint, its importance has lessened somewhat simply because so many bands have copied that style now, but for all those like me who got the album the very day of its release, it will definitely remain a MAJOR release. Before immersing myself in the writing process of this review, I decided to listen to the album a couple of times to reapprehend it, but I surprised myself rediscovering it and spinning it over and over again for the last 10 days. I know I am sentimental about the good old days, when every death metal album was awaited with fear and joy but it was a time when the death metal scene was not overwhelmed with quantities of shitty products as of nowadays.