I'm not a musician, but I take great pride in having a good ear for music. I'm way into extreme metal, but The Black Dahlia Murder is a band I could never really fully get into. The frantic and chaotic musical landscape they had laid out on previous albums was almost too much to take in—music for the A.D.D. generation that makes us slightly older guys' heads spin. I gradually started to take to them with their last release, Nocturnal. And now, more than ever, after witnessing them at the Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival and conducting an entertaining interview with guitarist Brian Eschbach, I am more than willing to give them a chance. After all, it's what all the cool metal kids are listening to these days, right?

Deflorate, the fourth album from The Black Dahlia Murder, is damn close to an extreme metal masterpiece. The band's style hasn't changed. It's still a molten combination of death, black metal and grind, blast beats and tempo-changing violence, but overall, the band sounds as tight and cohesive as they possibly could, given the nature of their music. New guitarist Ryan Knight (ex-Arsis) and drummer Shannon Lucas (ex-All That Remains) must have a lot to do with this. You usually don't change half of a band and end up with the same results. It sounds like vocalist Trevor Strnad filled up a bloody bucket with his gore-drenched lyrics and literally dumped them all over the finished musical product. Every song drips with his black metal shrieks and lower, corpse-raising bellows. Not being a musician, I can't begin to tell you how hard music this complicated is to play. Making any sense or coherency of these kinds of songs is an enormous feat in itself, and, for the first time I can remember, the band pulls this off with confidence and perfection. The members of The Black Dahlia Murder are becoming known as pranksters and “class clowns” of the current metal scene, but Deflorate is as serious and focused of an album that you could imagine.

The Black Dahlia Murder falls into the same realm as Hate Eternal, Job for a Cowboy and Cattle Decapitation, with the latter being the closest match. But Deflorate is more vile, intricate and evil than any of those band's recent releases. That I now can distinguish song from song, riff from riff and blast beat from blast beat makes it even more impressive.

Standouts include “Necropolis,” “A Selection Unnatural” and “Christ Deformed.”