How Bad Was Illud Divinum Insanus, Actually?
There is no death metal album more infamous than Illud Divinum Insanus. There are maybe albums more reviled by the hardcores; there is an endless amount of obscure, bedroom-Bandcamp mush that passes through the ears without leaving an impression; there are disappointments, there are polarisers, but nothing has the broad, wide-reaching infamy of Illud Divinum Insanus.
It was a record whose reputation immediately spread beyond the reach of your typical post-prime Morbid Angel release, quickly put alongside Cold Lake and St. Anger in the pantheon of the most infamous blunders in metal music. Even amongst those records, Illud Divinum Insanus is unique. Cold Lake was mostly a misfire in aesthetics and good taste, popularly perceived as an album of botched commercial appeal, the ultimate sell-out record—however true or untrue that description is—whereas St. Anger is an unmatched blunder in production and songwriting. Illud Divinum Insanus is in many ways a mix of both: regarded as a failure in both its aesthetic quality and its composition, derided as corny and dated in its presentation, lyrics, production and atmosphere.
It’s relevant to note that in the broad critical consensus, Illud Divinum Insanus did not face the universal skewering it did from long-time fans, receiving mostly minimal praise and scorn amidst a sea of beige review coverage. To the more casual critics it was seen as a misstep, but the reaction from the metal community was brutal and final, forever branding it as not just a failure in itself but a cardinal sin against the genre and its community. A thousand webcam reviews of inconsolable shouting men, proclaiming their severance from the covenant, no pun intended. It’s a bit embarrassing in hindsight, but it’s a testament to Morbid Angel’s lasting relevance and legacy that an album released so long after their peak was able to widely generate anything but apathy at all.
Time was probably also a factor in its reception; after a three-year wait for the fairly lukewarm reception to 2003’s Heretic, Illud Divinum Insanus would be almost a decade in the making when it finally dropped in 2011. The shock from the hardcores upon listening was only exacerbated by the time they had waited.
The strings on the opening track “Omni Potens” are comically dramatic but putting yourself in the shoes of a first-time listener you could sort of justify it, coping by saying that worse has been done in the field of melodramatic album intros, and that it’s nothing you wouldn’t hear from some lower-tier sympho-black band a decade prior. That, of course, would be ignoring the context of Morbid Angel being one of the most celebrated bands in extreme metal, and a band with far more resources at their hands than the average The Bishop Of Hexen clone. The pseudo-brass section in particular is just fucking hysterical, but the background choral chanting isn’t too bad though, and does attempt to set a more familiar atmosphere. You could imagine it fitting alongside some mid-budget fantasy game soundtrack circa 2002. Reminds me of something off of Enclave or Knights Of The Templar.
So far, to the uninitiated, it’s just another death metal record with a substandard moody intro—ten-a-penny. The next track, “Too Extreme!,” establishes the sound that would define the reputation of the album as a whole. “Too Extreme!” is wholly unsubtle with its mechanical percussion accented by these squealing injections of stock machinery sounds, all attempting to evoke the sounds of industry. I suppose it’s not too far removed in spirit from a track like “Thieves” by Minstry, which similarly evokes the specter of war and its industry through a blend of military marches, thrash metal and electro-industrial. The difference is that “Too Extreme!” is structured like the type of EBM you’d hear inside the clubs of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, but is also just so rigid and unappealing in that context. On a certain level you have to respect genuine unpleasantness in extreme music, but here its incompetence seems accidental and its sourness incidental. It’s got an appropriate name because it really is “Too Extreme!”: too much metal for the EBM crowd and just a fucking nightmare for the metal crowd. A more confident album would have opened with this; “Omni Potens” feels like a meek attempt to add some class with its dry computer orchestration. No, this is a mindlessly dumb, classless album and “Too Extreme!” smacks you in the face with that from the moment its shockingly programmed drums start.
The next track, “Existo Vulgoré,” is made even more bizarre by contrast. A whole album of “Too Extreme!” would have been a culture shock but at least cohesive; a clear shift in musical priority. “Existo Vulgoré” is just incredibly substandard death metal without much flair, dirt or grit: joylessly mechanical in a way that makes “Too Extreme!” seem like a fluid joy.
I think “Blades For Baal” is a marginal improvement, at least; certainly more recognizable in its opening with its dirtier bass tone and hookier chorus. It reminds me of a lot of the more popular death metal records from the 2000s sonically, and is far from a disaster—just a bit forgettable. On another Morbid Angel record it would be on lower-end of the tracklist, but here it’s generally one of the more respected tracks, if not a bit dated. Thankfully for the true freaks, the track that follows is definitely more notable.
Now, is “I Am Morbid” really that bad? It’s certainly the album’s point of no-return, but if you imagine it on a later-era White Zombie album, it’d probably just be a middling song in the tracklist with its occasionally corny guitar flair and an incredibly underwritten chorus that practically begs to become a concert staple. Putting aside the songs plodding pace, I will say I quite like the soloing, particularly the high-staccato muted section which gives it a bit of rhythmic identity. It’s far more groove metal than it is industrial metal, yet sabotaged of any commercial value with the relative harshness of the vocals; it’s stuck between worlds like so much of the album. Ultimately, perhaps the biggest issue facing the song is that it’s just a bit funny to listen to? As the track closes and the gruff barks of “Morbid, Morbid, Morbid!” morph from lead vocals to a crowd chant, you can’t help but smile. It’s the sort of track gifted to us by the inherent absurdity of metal. For all the visceral bite of your Toadliquor or Dragged Into Sunlight, for every kvlt inner-circle selling runs of hundred dollar cassette reissues on Bandcamp, you really can’t fully escape the ridiculousness and eccentricities at the heart of metal as a genre, and in a way “I Am Morbid” reminds me of that.
“10 More Dead” has more bite than “I Am Morbid,” but is weighed down by this feeling of being simultaneously restless yet stubbornly rigid. Ilud Divinum Insanus is most entertaining when it’s completely maddening and “10 More Dead” is just slightly below average, with not much that marks it out for scorn or praise. I think back to my initial reaction to the truly foul drum programming of other tracks, while here I’m left utterly comatose amidst the wave of blast beats and mini-kit dive-bomb soloing. It definitely attempts to have some rhythmic flair with these teases of pull-off, legato riffing but just doesn’t inspire any emotion in me at all.
“Destructos Vs. The Earth / Attack,” though? That’s what I’m here for. A song that genuinely wouldn’t be out of place on the first Ziltoid The Omniscient album, its attempts to sound militant feel simultaneously cartoonishly dated but also singularly bizarre, like some Hanzel und Gretyl b-side made for an S&M military fetishist party. The core melody, underlined by the modulated vocals, is so rote and uninteresting, its repetition seeming less stoic and more cowardly. The lyrics of the album might be at their peak here, something about the mantra of “We’re marching, Destructos marching on!” that just refuses to end is genuinely great fun. It’s clearly intended to incorporate the driving, pulsing rhythms of electro industrial with the bite of extreme metal, a well that had been long-drained by 2011 and thus had a pretty easy blueprint to draw from. That the track sounds so deformed honestly makes me like it more: its bizarre fake outs, its continual attempts at jumpdafuqup drops, the fact that the “Attack” section at the end is just some non-descript chugging and vocal sampling that follows a pronounced silence? Genuinely fantastic, there’s not a damn word of irony when I say any of this.
“Nevermore” is perhaps the most direct bit of death metal on the album. A lead single, it’s naturally the most accessible track on the album, with its harshness sanded down and with its clearer vocal enunciation. Perfectly competent and, as a result, generally uninteresting to talk about save for these slightly unsure sounding backing vocals that waver nervously in the mix.
With a title like “Beauty Meets Beast,” I was actually hoping for some Nymphetamine-era soft-harsh vocal duets but that isn’t the case, unless you count the bizarrely soft moans of “huhhh” dotted throughout the track, I suppose. It’s often considered one of the “good” songs on the album, but again is mostly uninteresting to me save for when it utilizes this surprisingly bittersweet chord progression that’s both engaging and thematically appropriate, given the lyrics. The actual shredding goes through one ear and out the other, but the progression that backs it? It’s quite good, almost deceptively emotive by the standards of a band like Morbid Angel.
I find “Profundis – Mea Culpa” similarly uninteresting, because while it does incorporate those electro-industrial elements into the track, it’s clearly trying to be more tasteful in their delivery, and as such just isn’t very memorable outside of its occasional excesses in the drum programming and production choices. I think if given all the time and resources in the world, this is what the album would have been like: the platonic ideal of Illud Divinum Insanus laid bare, something that probably wouldn’t have been received well but certainly wouldn’t have cultivated such an immensely negative legacy.
I swear, the introduction to “Radikult” might have the single worst drum programming I’ve heard on any professionally recorded album ever. This is probably THE track that defines Illud Divinum Insanus to me. It’s got a clear Antichrist Superstar-era Marilyn Manson influence: the rumbling, rocking bass; the muted, textural chugs of the lead guitar that lead into simple power chord riffs; the whisper-sung, close-to-mic vocals; the fucking hysterical lyrics; it’s all there. “Radikult”‘s appeal is naturally reliant on your mileage with that very specific sound, but in a way I do appreciate it.
Because goddamn it sounds like they’re TRYING, and maybe that’s a bit patronizing to say about a band of grown men with a massive legacy, but how many bands decades into their career swing this big when they experiment? Illud Divinum Insanus had to be a mess; a band like them could never make an album like this, even if made optimally and as perfect-to-vision as intended, and get away with it. It’s an album that was born to die, from the second the first note was recorded.
But while die it ultimately did, it hardly effected the legacy Morbid Angel established. There was no retrospective dismissal of their classics, no questioning of their influence, and the band persisted. They’d return with another record, 2017’s Kingdoms Disdained. It had a competent modern death metal sound, fans bought it, it reviewed grand, and not a soul on earth has thought about it since. Even after re-listening to it for this review, I cannot remember a thing about it.
You know what I’m reminded of most when I hear Illud Divinum Insanus? Into The Pandemonium. A similar stew of broad influences, commercial and esoteric, all mixed together on a singularly bizarre album. The difference is that one is a cult-classic, one is damn near heretical in reputation and that’s likely never to change. I think if this album came out after Domination, and was more tasteful in its production—more Fear Factory and less Combichrist—you’d hear less complaints. It’d be regarded as just another in a long line of prominent ’90s metal misfires. But then again, so much of what makes it unique and entertaining, though unintentionally so,would be lost if it were tasteful, it it were proper, if it were normal.
Ultimately it’s just the sound of guys trusting their instincts to their own error, stapling together elements of ’90s and 00s metal trends into a factory line death metal formula, resulting in something deformed; ugly but also singularly fascinating. We’re now as far removed from Kingdoms Disdained as Illud Divinum Insanus was from Heretic at its release, and the albums reputation hasn’t grown in that time. What’s unique about the album is unlikely to ever be appreciated, and it’s traditional, redeemable moments are unlikely to be bothered with again. But who knows, if Lulu can undergo some amount of perverse re-evaluation, why not Illud Divinum Insanus?
