Where earlier works added color to a lack of feeling, the pits and peaks of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love strike a richer chord by painting in a hue a shade lighter and adding detail to the demons in the dark.
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love has moving, emotional pieces and sharp performances bolstered by a band clearly stretching out of its comfort zone successfully. The album is a refreshing new shade of their sound without abandoning the band’s core mechanics.
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love takes the strengths of its predecessors and refines them even further, which results in a dynamic emotional and musical experience that previous Deafheaven records came close to achieving, but never quite like this.
Five years removed from their landmark Sunbather, Deafheaven have never seemed less interested in being fashionable—as a result, they sound newly content.
They’ve experimented with vocals, concentrated their musical chemistry, further polished their production, and tweaked their songwriting so that the transitions between movements in their songs are less sheer cliff-faces of fury and more lithe passages. All this, combined with some of the best songs they’ve ever written, makes Ordinary Corrupt Human Love the band’s most irrefutable credential as a leader in modern Rock.
Deafheaven is a ambitious heavy rock band, a gathering of innovative musical minds, and one of the very best guitar bands on Earth. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is strong evidence of all three.
Deafheaven finally look comfortable in their many different skins, their opposing worlds gliding together seamlessly, able to change between brutally heavy and light as air in seconds.
On OCHL, Deafheaven refuse to settle for a scene or a sound, but rather open themselves up to textures and combinations that defy simple categorization. Music is their joy, their tool and their medium, and heaviness is just one thread in the process.
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is a critical reminder to card-carrying loyalists and new inductees alike of their own agency; that it's potentially revelatory, not sacrilegious, for the spectrum of black metal to include things outside of its purview.
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love isn't going to change detractors' minds about Deafheaven. Instead, with its searing depictions of emotional and spiritual struggle in a relentlessly ambitious musical presentation, it should attract a new legion of listeners as well as deliver assurance and solace to those who found their earlier records so compelling.
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love ... marks a band brimming with confidence, experimenting with their sound, adding new textures at every turn.
Not only does OCHL feel more balanced than the band’s three previous releases—which each placed an enormous burden upon their few moments of passive instrumentation to maintain an even keel—it also feels entirely more transparent.
Although the band have spent their last three albums developing a cohesive, distinct sound that’s all their own, on ‘OCHL’ they’re keen to take risks, side step that familiar territory and play with the formula.
While Deafheaven do their best to coalesce their efforts on OCHL, it’s the bigger moments that resonate most satisfyingly. It’s not perfect, but on this evidence, the Cali-based group are still one of today’s most stimulating metal bands.
Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is a waypoint in an increasingly divided world of niche cultures and categorisations, and it’ll capture the imaginations of those secure outside their comfort zones while further alienating detractors.
Maybe the eclecticism and excellence of this as a piece of music marks this as the moment we should all just start praising Deafheaven for the ambition and honesty of what they are, rather than bemoaning what they aren’t, and clearly have no interest in being.
Rife with post-rock cliches, Deafheaven's fourth album contains the band's least inspired genre-blending to date.
#2 | / | Kerrang! |
#5 | / | Treble |
#7 | / | PopMatters |
#12 | / | Revolver |
#14 | / | Decibel |
#14 | / | FLOOD |
#14 | / | Sputnikmusic |
#18 | / | Earbuddy |
#18 | / | Vinyl Me, Please |
#22 | / | NME |