Decrepit Birth
- Story by Cosmo Lee
Santa Cruz death metallers bite the pain, looking not back, but forward
“Emotion” isn’t a word commonly associated with death metal. Yet when guitarist Matt Sotelo talks about Decrepit Birth’s new record, Diminishing Between Worlds, he keeps returning to it. “I’ve been through a lot this last year. The whole band has been through a lot.” That’s putting it lightly. In late 2006, then-guitarist Mike Turner was arrested on charges of child molestation and sexual battery. One of his victims was the child of a fellow bandmate.
Turner is now doing 23 years to life, but Sotelo isn’t resting easy. “As a father to a two year-old daughter, I don’t think I’ll completely get over it. He was a very close friend, and he betrayed us in a very ruthless and brutal way. It’s been a dark force over the last year, especially for me. I have trust issues because I have a child. I spend a lot of time making sure that my daughter is safe.” But as Decrepit Birth’s main songwriter, Sotelo channeled the negativity into something positive. “With that pain and that sadness, there’s a lot of emotion. That’s definitely part of the creation of this album. It’s a bittersweet thing. I love the music, but it did come from some pain.”
Sotelo is a changed man, and Decrepit Birth a changed band. Five years after full-length debut ...And Time Begins, the band is no longer just about brutal, technical death metal. Diminishing’s flowing melodies and abstract harmonies pick up where Death and Atheist left off. Clean tones, acoustic guitars and keyboards interweave throughout. Sotelo’s going for more than the usual, as he puts it, “riff salad.” “There’s a lot of talent out there right now, but people are forgetting how to write a good song. It’s become a musical Olympics. Everyone’s trying to outdo each other with speed and all that. I’m not saying that I haven’t gotten caught up in that at one point, but I’m just trying to write good songs now.”
He’s got more than good songs now. He’s got a record, wrapped in killer Dan Seagrave artwork, that’s a breath of fresh air in a stagnant death metal scene. He’s got a recording studio, Legion, that’s yielded records by Element and Embryonic Devourment. He’s having the time of his life on tour with the Black Dahlia Murder, 3 Inches of Blood and Hate Eternal. And after such a drastic shift in sound, he’s still got fans, and they’re growing in number. “There might be some disappointed people out there,” he acknowledges. “But honestly, I gotta say that on this tour, people have been coming up to us nightly and saying, ‘Thank you so much for writing something different and fresh.’”
