The Deceiver – Desu Taem (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

When you hear people talk about musical journeys, it is usually someone speaking backstage at a reality TV music show, someone trying to sound exciting, knowledgeable, and transformed by the experience. Someone, essentially trying to win the audience over, and therefore, sympathy, votes and ultimately the chance to record an album that sinks without a trace once the show finishes. But sonic journeys do exist, but they exist in musical terms only. The Deceiver, the latest one from Desu Taem, is precisely that, and what a sonic journey it is too..

Desu Taem has, over the course of the handful of singles since I have encountered them, explored all manner of rock styles and beyond. Here, they immerse themselves in a world of big metal riffs and thunderous drums, a world of dark designs and sinuous, twisted vocals, a world that fans of, say, Black Sabbath will feel at home in immediately.

And like the aforementioned British West Midlands musical stalwarts, Desu Taem knows how to take the listener on a musically changing path that ebbs and flows between several sounds and styles, wanders through highs and lows, taking us from delicate, understated acoustica to sky-searing crescendos.

Something is taken from the pages of progressive rock in their ability to switch between these different musical paths. These paths take us from minimalist, almost classical guitar to thunderous metallic riffs, from drifting spaciousness to symphonic grandeur, controlled guitar salvoes to raging six-string onslaughts. And all the time, the vocals switch between the narrator and the titular tempter himself.

This hellish, sonic vision, something seemingly drawn from Dante’s Inferno or the vivid imagination of Hieronymous Bosch, is conjured masterfully by the music, not just what is specifically said but what the music hints at, the unspeakable acts, the knowledge of worse yet to come.

Desu Taem is one of those bands that defy easy classification, as all the best bands do; they don’t only turn their hand to hard rock and metal but conjure up folk delicacy, classical grandeur and symphonic sublimity, too. Sometimes, as The Deceiver demonstrates so eloquently, they can do that all within the same song.