Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: technical death metal

Showing posts with label technical death metal. Show all posts

Wednesday, 8 January 2025

Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere (2025)

Country: USA
Style: Progressive Death Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Here's an album that's made a lot of top ten lists for 2024, unsurprisingly given how much buzz has surrounded Blood Incantation lately. I reviewed their previous album, 2019's Hidden History of the Human Race, in January 2020 because it had similarly made so many end of year lists. The general consensus of the critics is the same for each: they're both masterpieces that move death metal in new directions. What's odd is that I found myself happy to agree with them last time but not this. There are the roots for a masterpiece here, but it just doesn't hold together for me.

There are two tracks, The Stargate and The Message, presumably broken up over the two sides of the vinyl release, and each of them is broken up into three parts named Tablets. That's hardly an unusual approach, but I can't figure out why any of them are separated the way they are. Tablet I of The Stargate, for instance, features three utterly distinct parts that aren't separated at all yet the ambience that ends Tablet I flows right into Tablet II as if there shouldn't be a gap. I can't see what Blood Incantation are trying to do.

By utterly distinct, by the way, I mean utterly distinct. Tablet I starts out with bubbly synths but a jagged guitar quickly joins in as if this is a Voivod album. Thirty seconds in, it's clearly technical or progressive death metal and that settles down within the next minute and we're off and running at pace. It's all good stuff and it's building. However, it all falls away at the two minute mark, so it can veer into something completely different.

Suddenly it's funk. Or reggae. Or soft rock. Or jazzy space rock. Maybe it's all those things at once, rather like a lively krautrock piece with a touch of Journey, especially once a keyboard solo shifts the feel firmly into space rock. Eventually, it evolves into Pink Floyd, a Dave Gilmour clone rocking out in a guitar solo. This is a wild and very interesting three and half minutes. Again, it's all good stuff, entirely instrumental, but if I have no idea why it's there at this point in this song.

What's more, it doesn't end with Tablet I. It just erupts back into prog death at the five and a half minute mark, rather abruptly too, as if someone realised that the radio station had changed from the metal station to the krautrock station and tweaked the dial back again. This closing section is, you guessed it, all good stuff. Everything here is well played and clearly placed very deliberately. I merely have no idea what it's supposed to achieve. I get the feeling that it's supposed to take me to a particular place but it doesn't. I'm stranded in the airport terminal wondering which of these planes to catch.

If the end of the part prompts the decision, then it's that krautrock plane to Berlin, as Tablet II is almost entirely told in that instrumental vein, merely with added samples for flavour. In fact, it's so krautrock that there's a guest musician here and it's Thorsten Quaeschning, the current leader of electronic pioneers Tangerine Dream. That isn't particularly shocking, because it sounds like a track of theirs all the way until it turns into pastoral folk rock three minutes in and eventually gets to a heavy prog metal section, sans the usual death components, at the end. That's a genre even a musical chameleon like Tangerine Dream hasn't tried out yet.

I could keep going at this level of detail throughout all three tablets of both songs, but there's no point. The same wild shifts happen and, while every section sounds great on its own, none of it has any reason I can figure out. What's that ethnic instrumentation on Tablet III, in front of the tribal drums? I have no idea but it sounds good and makes no sense. Why does Tablet II of The Message veer into jazz out of nowhere? Why does Tablet III open up in a clear thrash metal section, a nicely powerful one at that until the death growls show up and minimise it? Why does that shift into the same pastoral flute and soothing folk prog as the middle of Tablet II of The Stargate? I don't know.

It feels like I should like this. I tend to appreciate bands subverting genres by merging them in odd ways. I tend to love extreme metal bands dipping into unusual rock territory, especially with ethnic instruments to mix it up even more. I tend to like being bludgeoned here but soothed there. That's joyous to me. But it has to make sense. There has to be a reason for it to happen, lyrical or musical or whatever. Set a scene and paint it with music so I can see what it is. It seems like this is trying to do that but it doesn't know how.

And that's why, as beautifully played as this is and as fascinating as its musical shifts are, it simply doesn't work for me as an album. Hidden History of the Human Race was an easy 9/10 for me, even though I don't dish those ratings out like candy. This has to be a 6/10 because it makes no sense to me at all and I've listened through enough times for a sudden realisation to feel long overdue.

Wednesday, 11 September 2024

Nile - The Underworld Awaits Us All (2024)

Here's the tenth album for Egyptian metallers Nile and pretty much everything I said about their ninth, Vile Necrotic Rites, holds here, except perhaps for the bits about diverse instrumentation. This is more traditional instrumentally and perhaps that's why it doesn't quite match that album, the unusual string sound on a delightful interlude called The Pentagrammathion of Nephren-Ka notwithstanding and whatever's going on in the coda to Under the Curse of the One God.

The most diverse element this time is vocal, with a whole slew of guest vocalists joining guitarist and lead singer Karl Sanders and the other members of the band who chime in occasionally with a backing vocal. Tellingly, many of these are female, though not from singers known for their work for other bands, and they don't usually sound typical for metal. It would be fairer to say that they sound like they've been borrowed from opera or musical theatre or jazz. A few are male and more expected for epic metal, on songs like True Gods of the Desert.

The unusual female vocals aren't frequent but they're always prominent when they happen and none of them feel like they ought to fit, even if they're all in time with what's unfolding around them. Of course, they do fit, even if the abiding impression is that they're being performed next door in another studio but someone opened an ill advised window so that they bleed through at the precisely perfect time. Then the window is closed again and they're gone.

The first arrives in Overlords of the Black Earth, as if an opera is determined to spring out of that black earth and the band are the titular overlords tasked with performing a ritual to stop it. I'm sure that's not what's happening in the lyrics, even if "we utter the words of power" does rather sound like opera. That returns on Under the Curse of the One God, even if it's just for a couple of lines, while the guitar is warping in fascinating fashion, and on Doctrine of Last Things, the title track and others.

I should call out this warping because it's a fascinating approach, most obviously on Overlords of the Black Earth but also to a lesser degree on a number of other songs. As if their sound wasn't already an intense thing, Nile have bulked up to a trio of guitarists: founder Sanders, plus Brian Kingsland, who was on Vile Necrotic Rites, and one of two new fish this year, Zach Jeter (the other is bassist Dan Vadim Von). I have no idea who's doing this warp guitar thing, but it's a wild and experimental idea that gives the firm impression that the rituals that Nile are performing are opening or closing portals with a quirky and esoteric effect.

Of course, it's still Nile and that means that it's uncompromisingly brutal but also very technical, so that there's never a dull moment. Stelae of Vultures is a powerful opener, but the second track simply erupts out of the gate and I wonder if those should have been swapped around, especially given that the second track is done and dusted in under four blistering minutes while the opener extends out to six and change. It does that appropriately, I should add; it just accordingly fails to have the same impact as the shorter, sharper shock after it.

By the way, I say "second track" so I don't have to keep saying Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes, a title so drawn out it even gets abbreviated in the lyrics. If my favourite songs are the ones with strange vocal additions and unusual effects and codas, like the triple whammy of Overlords of the Black Earth, Under the Curse of the One God and Doctrine of Last Things, I also keep coming back to the second track for the most blistering pace and impact anywhere on the album.

And, of course, along with everything else I said in my Vile Necrotic Rites review that holds true on this one, there's one statement that abides above them all. That's that I'm far less a fan of brutal death metal than I am most other extreme metal genres, but Nile are probably my favourite band to work overtly within that style. My biggest problem with brutal death metal is that much of it is unable to distinguish itself from the rest. Nile are the emphatic exception to that rule. I like this, just not quite as much as its predecessor.

Thursday, 5 September 2024

Fleshgod Apocalypse - Opera (2024)

This sixth album from Italian symphonic death metal mainstays Fleshgod Apocalypse is well titled. Sure, it opens with an aria, Ode to Art (De' Sepolcri) to showcase the soaring soprano of Veronica Bordacchini, who's worked with the band as a session and touring musician since 2011 but became a full time member in 2020, serving not only as their female vocalist but as their clean vocalist, as long term bassist and previous clean vocalist Paolo Rossi left in 2023. However, the best adjective to use to describe Fleshgod is "more" and that works just as well for opera. Each is grandiose and overdone and larger than life and that's kind of the point.

I've always appreciated how Fleshgod can throw so much at the wall and yet have it all stick. They seem chaotic in the extreme to anyone who's never heard them before, but a few listens allows us to realise what's going on. We almost need to train our ears to acknowledge what they're doing. On this album, either my ears are finally fully trained or it's a little bit more accessible than has been the case, especially on certain songs.

For instance, the first song proper is I Can Never Die, which is typically frantic stuff but it's easy to dissect after a couple of listens to see this as an unholy merger of alternative rock, symphonic pop and death metal, with plenty of orchestration. It moves from one of these to another consistently and eventually does it all at once. There's a late section when it whisks through hyperspeed death metal, hard rock guitar solo, soaring opera and symphonic pop in a highly memorable minute and then combining them all together. It's as accessible as I've heard Fleshgod (at least until Till Death Do Us Part arrives at the end of this album, but I'll get to that).

Other songs aren't quite as obvious. We can deconstruct Pendulum to a degree, but it's never as simple as we think we can make it. What's going on a mintue in, for instance? There are points in this song where the intensity drops completely away to leave clean female vocals over an alt rock instrumentation, but then the harsh male vocals offer an almost sarcastic commentary. And then there's piano, that gets truly wild towards the end of the song. Bloodclock opens up with harp and finds its way through intense technical death metal to musical theatre, delivered in a snarling rap, and then powers up with choirs and orchestration. These aren't as easy to work out.

What's telling is that I'm struggling to choose my favourite tracks, not because none of them stand out for special mention but because they all do. At War with My Soul opens heavy and choral like a Therion song, but speeds up the drums and builds male and female vocals and instrumentation in a common direction. That's unusual for Fleshgod but it works. Morphine Waltz is European power metal merged with avant-garde musical theatre, all driven by a possessed pianist and framed as a technical death metal song. The whispered "trust me" on Matricide 8.21 points the way to the alt rock approach that reaches the staccato riffing and the almost rapped vocals. Every song needs a special mention becaues it does something different.

And that holds even more true for Till Death Us Do Part, on the other side of Per Aspera ad Astra. It starts out slow and heavy, not as slow as doom metal but insanely slow for Fleshgod. Drummer Eugene Ryabchenko, who we can believe has eight limbs to maintain these tempos, must feel like he's playing this song in crazy slow motion. It's slow like a slow Black-era Metallica song, but then it drops into symphonic pop with vocal melodies more like Evanescence. They rinse and repeat a few times before escalating in emphasis but never truly in speed, even when it gets a little faster in the second half. I like it a lot but it's surely the least Fleshgod song I've heard Fleshgod do.

Usually it's easy to explain what a band sounds like by comparing them to others. On albums past, we could often compare Fleshgod to Septicflesh because both combine overtly classical music with extreme metal so tightly that they become one thing. However, we can't do that any more and I'd find it even harder than usual here. Sure, there's opera and death metal. Those are givens. What remains includes Emilie Autumn, Avatar, Evanescence, Disturbed, Carl Orff, Therion, Meshuggah... it's a list of names you probably didn't expect to see together, let alone mentioned in a review of what is still technical symphonic death metal, with drums that often reach black metal speeds.

I liked Fleshgod's previous album, 2019's Veleno, but I didn't like it as much as a lot of critics, who rank it among the best symphonic metal albums of all time. This one I like more. It's accessible for Fleshgod, but it's still wildly extreme when compared to pretty much everyone else on the planet. Nobody's going to dismiss this by suggesting that they've sold out, but it's easier to deconstruct than usual and it features a host of more recognisably modern aspects in its sound. And I'm liking it just as much on a seventh time through as I did on a first.

Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Aborted - Vault of Horrors (2024)

I guess Aborted should still be listed as a Belgian band, given that sole founder member and lead vocalist Sven de Caluwé is Belgian, but they're a pretty international bunch nowadays. What blew me away from moment one is the drumming of Ken Bedene, one of two Californians in the line-up, his fourteen year stint with the band making him the longest serving member who wasn't there at the beginning. The others hail from Iceland and Italy, but the latter is bassist Stefano Franceschini who left in 2023 after seven years on board. I don't believe he's been replaced yet but he does play on this album for presumably the last time.

Aborted are usually listed as technical death metal, which is entirely appropriate, but Bedene is a grindcore drummer when Dreadbringer kicks off the album. He doesn't stay there, but damn, he's fast. Of course, everyone else has to be totally on top of their game for this to hold together and I would be failing at my job if I didn't point that out, but it took plenty of effort to tear myself away from what he was doing, whatever anyone else was up to at any particular moment. I remember a gig in Bradford way back in 1988, with Carcass headlining during their demo days, at which I found myself hypnotised by the drummer of Intense Degree. He was so fast that I couldn't see his arms when he was in full flow because they were just a blur. That came quickly to mind here, though the majority of the speed seems to be in his feet.

After Bedene, it was de Caluwé who grabbed my attention with his vocals. He mostly delivers in a guttural death growl that's somehow clear enough for me to be able to tell that he sings entirely in English. However, like Bedene, there are points where he shifts up to grindcore speeds, others where he moves his pitch up to provide more of a black metal shriek and still more where there's some sort of post production done on his voice to give it a weirdly echoing effect. It's almost like he's inside such a small box that he'd have to be crushed into a cube to fit but which somehow lets his voice remain as huge and resonant as ever.

At least, I believe most of that is de Caluwé, but it's hard to actually tell, because there's a guest vocalist singing with him on every single track. Most are North American, with four from the USA and four from Canada, including Oliver Rae Aleron from Archspire on The Shape of Hate and Alex Erian from Despised Icon on Death Cult. However, there's also a Brit, Jason Evans from Ingested, on Insect Politics, the most overtly grindcore song here, and an Italian, Francesco Paoli from the mighty Fleshgod Apocalypse on Condemned to Rot. No wonder that one has a particularly dense sound. Generally speaking, the multiple voices helps this album considerably, adding a diversity that might not otherwise have been there.

The guitarists are Ian Jekelis and Daníel Konráðsson and what I found fascinating about what they do here is that they never seem to solo in genre. During the majority of these songs, they play at a quick pace because that's what everyone else is doing, and they add depth to the music. However, there are points where they play a lot slower, or at least whoever's handling lead at any particular moment does, and that adds a fascinating dimension. There are long sustained notes in The Shape of Hate and Hellbound, even though everything else around them is fast, and the solos, in most of these songs, tend to be almost traditional heavy metal solos, hardly extreme at all.

While those solos can be rather engaging, this is the exact opposite of easy listening. It's not just that it's very loud and very fast, it's that we have to pay a lot of attention to what's happening. It can be easy to get lost in some of these songs, like Condemned to Rot and Brotherhood of Sleep. Hellbound may the most immediately accessible. Death Cult has an almost singalong chorus, merely a simple and brutal one. The Golgothan is an attention grabber, because of electronic pulses as part of the beat, and there are deeper keyboards later in the song which add another element to the sound.

My favourites are the ones that are complex but not impenetrable, ones that I can grasp within a few listens but still have hidden depths that I can explore on further runs through. Dreadbringer has to be the most obvious, but The Golgothan is close and Malevolent Haze has an emotional arc to explore. It seems bigger than anything else here, perhaps appropriately as the closer, only the single that hinted at the album, Infinite Terror, after it as a bonus track. That's a good one too.

It's just hard to call out tracks after only five listens, though. This is material so dense that we just can't judge it properly until we've enjoyed its company for a while, bought it dinner and visited its parents. We have to dive in deep and explore it to find what it's truly offering. The whole album is still growing on me and I'm a little wary about only giving it a 7/10. I have a feeling that, in a week or two, I'd give it more, but I have to let it go right now so I can move onto other albums by other bands. C'est la vie.

Friday, 17 March 2023

The Fallen Prophets - Perpetual Damnation (2023)

Much of what I review nowadays is from Europe, given that there's far more invention in play over there than in North America at the moment, but I try to keep my eyes focused on the globe. There is a lot of amazing music coming out of South America right now and some from Asia too, even if it seems to be underperforming when compared to population. Oceania is a gift that keeps on giving and that leaves Africa, which I'd love to cover more often, if only the continent produced more in a rock and metal vein. Much of what I do see is from South Africa and the Fallen Prophets are a fresh name to me, hailing from Cape Town.

They seem to like their metalcore in South Africa and there's an element of that here, but mostly I hear death metal, more melodic than brutal and often technical too. There are two vocalists, with Pieter Pieterse the lead. He delivers a deep death growl in relatively traditional fashion, with lots of relish, if not as much intonation and variety as I'd like. Occasionally, Francois van der Merwe has something to do behind him and, if I'm identifying him correctly, his contributions are more in the black metal vein, higher and more of a shriek than a growl. He doesn't get the spotlight often, but there are moments in the closer, Rotten from the Bone.

The music follows their lead, with tone particularly important and melody behind it. If I'm reading correctly, there are three guitarists in play, which explains why the sound is so dense. Daniel Louw covers lead duties and the two vocalists add rhythm. They chug well and they speed up well too, if not particularly far. There's some thrash here, especially on the second half, but they rarely think about going full tilt and the fastest aspect is often Dylan Haupt's drums. Given van der Marwe's vocals and Haupt's drums, a black metal influence is clear, even if it's never particularly overt, just sitting underneath everything else winking at us.

The Fallen Prophets have been around since 2011 and this is their third album, with a couple of EPs in between. As such, it's not surprising that the band are tight, even if two of the musicians joined after COVID and a third not long before it. They feel seasoned and they fall into grooves easily. The catch to that is that I wanted more from them than just falling into grooves. There are moments in which they provide something extra, like the wonderful intro to album opener Let the Weak Suffer and a brief moment for the bass to take the spotlight in Fatal Invocation. These things elevate the music and they do them well, so I wonder why they don't do them more often.

Instead of evolving their sound to provide something different from other death metal bands, I'm hearing far more focus on simply doing what they do very well indeed. It's like they care more that an audience leaves a gig thinking that they're better than anyone else on the bill than different in any way. I'm all for bands trying to being the best they can be, but death metal is a crowded genre and there needs to be something more to distinguish one band from a scene. Maybe this band are more technical than anyone else in Cape Town and damn they're tight, but there's not a lot that's going to make them stand out against other tight technical death metal bands on the internet.

And so, this has to be a recommended album because it's good stuff, but it's going to play best to a strict audience of death metal connoisseurs. Listeners with broader tastes would dig the solos on Asphyxiation Chamber or how well they shift from a slow chug on As the Dead Swarm to what may be the fastest pace on the album, but these are second half songs and they may not get that far if they're not die hard death metal fans. I like the second half more than the first, not just those two songs but also Fatal Invocation after them. This is the Fallen Prophets at their thrashiest and that appeals to me.

They're a good band and this is a good album, but I feel that there's a better one in them yet. This is reliable good rather than inventive good. The hints of invention tell me that they could knock it out of the park with their fourth album, but they'll need to figure out what to add to their sound to take them to the next level.

Friday, 14 January 2022

Archspire - Bleed the Future (2021)

Yeah, eagle-eyed readers will realise that I've already reviewed one technical death metal album from Canada that was released on 29th October, 2021 already this week and I'm supposed to mix it up. Well, whatever First Fragment's album was, and it was a heck of a lot of things, it really didn't play for me as death metal. Progressive metal, absolutely. Flamenco metal, sure. Technical in any description, of course. Death metal? Not so much. This, however, is nothing but. Archspire are on their fourth album of brutal death metal that's very fast and very technical and they couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

I haven't heard them before, but I've seen their name popping up all over the place, both over a period of time and in the 2021 end of lists. This album has shown up in five thus far and I'm still in process factoring others in. To highlight the scale of that achievement, only seven albums made it into that many lists and I happily gave Dream Theater, Gojira, Iron Maiden and Mastodon 8/10s. If this follows suit, that only leaves Cannibal Corpse with a 7/10 and Rivers of Nihil still to review. It's also notable that, on two of those lists, at Angry Metal Guy and Metal Observer, it snuck into the top five.

Of all the many bands approaching death metal from a technical or progressive angle, Archspire feel like they're one of the truest to the genre. They aren't spending half the album wandering in other genres. They aren't bringing in sounds from every which where. They're playing death metal and they're playing it incredibly fast and incredibly technically. And I mean that literally because it boggles the mind how fast and technical this gets. Sure, I've heard drummers this fast before and, I'm sure, vocalists this fast. However, Archspire start and stop songs on dimes with such frequency that they have to be insanely tight. This isn't just about keeping time with each other, it's about a need to do that at machine gun speed.

And I should call out Oliver Rae Aleron for special attention here. He doesn't play an instrument in Archspire, he just sings, and that's a tough job to truly live up to. Death growls are limited just in what they are, so it takes a really good vocalist to make them interesting and a special one to sound iconic enough to be either recognisable or invaluable. In my First Fragment review, I made the suggestion that David AB could have not shown up and I wouldn't have noticed. Aleron is such an integral part of Archspire's sound that, not only would they not sound remotely the same with him gone, they would sound notably lesser. He's the textbook for death metal vocals.

And what he does is to keep up with the drums of Spencer Prewett and the guitars of Dean Lamb and Tobi Morelli (and, on songs like Abandon the Linear, the obvious bass of Jared Smith). Which are not slow, trust me. We're beyond thrash metal speed here, into what tends to be reserved for black metal walls of sound, but it's death metal through and through and closer to brutal than it is to melodic. Aleron delivers his vocals in a fascinating way because they're a growl that he spits out as if he was rapping at high speed. Ever heard Rap God by Eminem? Or Godzilla? Aleron surely reaches similar syllables per second delivery speed at points and he's doing it in a growl.

Another fact I should call out here for notice is the fact that Bleed the Future is done and dusted a half hour in. Never mind these technical death metal opuses that bloat to the hour mark and even beyond, with a frequent resultant loss of interest in the listener due to sheer fatigue. This blast of brutal death starts as it means to go, finishes as it started and wraps up in half an hour. Not one of these eight songs reaches five minutes. It's as emphatically in your face as April's Cannibal Corpse album but it does a lot more than just bludgeon. I can tell the songs apart, for a start.

Drone Corpse Aviator, for instance, which kicks off the album, has a notable stop start approach, a cool call and response between voice and guitar and a delightful interlude in the middle that sees a reprise later on. All in four minutes. It's not a clone of anything else here, right down to the solo in the second half, even it carries a similar punch to other tracks here. Even its final moments are memorable. Golden Mouth of Ruin does some similar things, but the riffs and solos are different, the trade offs between instruments are different and nobody attuned to this sort of speed will be mistaking them. Abandon the Linear has some amazing bass runs. And so on and so on.

Favourites? Good question. I love the runs in Abandon the Linear, whether on guitar or bass. The title track is a spat out gem with another delightful drop away from frantic in the midsection and cool guitars taking it home. The rapid fire vocals on Drain of Incarnation are fascinating. And I do get a kick out of the voicemail introducing A.U.M. that asks for danger to be brought back into the music. Well, that's what Archspire do. This is up there with First Fragment, in its way, for technical insanity, but it also feels like a dangerous brutal death metal album. There's the difference.

Wednesday, 12 January 2022

First Fragment - Gloire éternelle (2021)

I don't read a lot of other music critics, though I try to keep up with the magazines to see what's in the release schedule and what's generating a lot of buzz. One site I do pop over to once in a while to see how they reacted to a particular album is Angry Metal Guy, because the critics there for the most part have zero interest in kissing any band's arse. They write longer reviews, they rarely feel biased and they don't dish out high scores like candy. Well, the Angry Metal Guy in charge of that rowdy bunch put this at the very top of his 2021 list, above Soen, Scardust and Aephanemer, every one of those responsible for a great 2021 album. I should check this one out too.

And it's truly wild, though I don't know how well it can justify its standard genre definition. There is death metal here, certainly, but it's mostly in the vocals of David AB. Even when they're playing at speed, which is often, they don't feel remotely like a death metal band. I'll buy neo-classical as a description far more, because this is virtuosic and it damn well knows it. Everyone in the band is apparently as happy to show off their substantial technical chops as they are to play actual songs. If they weren't so tight, I'd think that they didn't care about the songs at all, performing only for the technical difficulty and not caring about the artistic merit.

It's very easy for a listener to forget about any one of these songs too, because we get caught up in the notes. There are two guitarists here, Phil Tougas and Nick Miller, with Dominic Lapointe on bass often playing lead alongside them. A song like Pantheum may have some broader structure to it, but my ears heard it as a fox chase. I don't know if Tougas is chasing Miller or vice versa but one of them's chasing the other and he's doing it from beginning to end. Maybe they switch.

The bass of Lapointe overtakes both by the time it's all over, coming out of nowhere, but the point is that it's always all about these instruments. David AB actually sings on a lot of the song, but he had no reason to be there. He certainly wasn't singing lead for me and he never once grabbed my attention. Maybe he's part commentator but mostly he's just a spectator like the rest of us. He's not bad at what he does, but he could have wandered down the pub for a pint while the band put this song down on vinyl and I don't think I'd have even noticed. So much for the death metal in this death metal.

What I should have mentioned before now is that these guitars aren't just shredding in the way a shred guitarist tends to shred. I mention that and you think of Yngwie J. Malmsteen, which is fine. He's a great shredder and almost the definition of neo-classical nowadays, but that's not all that First Fragment are doing. Just check out the opening title track to see what I mean. Sure, it's neo-classical, but it's not Yngwie for a while. Never mind death metal, Tougas and Miller are duetting a flamenco piece here while Lapointe and drummer Nicholas Wells wandered in from the jazz club next door. This isn't metal and it isn't even rock. It's heavy world music, all castanets and slap bass, until almost three minutes in. Then it goes full on Yngwie.

The other thing to know is that there's a lot of everything here. Not only are there more notes in any one song than your average Dragonforce album, there are a lot of songs and they don't skimp on the running time. The title track almost reaches nine minutes and De chair et de haine does. If that wasn't enough, In'el is longer than both put together, almost reaching nineteen on its own. I could call out that song alone as overwhelming, but it's also the truest technical death metal song here. When the short ones are a lot to take in, that holds double or triple for the long ones. And then scale that up to seventy one minutes and change, the length of the entire album, and there's nobody on the planet who can take it all in. Maybe a five year old Mozart, but he's dead.

The crazy thing is that it works, just not initially and certainly not all at once. This is an album that will clobber you over the head until you're a pool of dribble on the floor. Only as you recover and realise that you didn't entirely dislike the experience, so tune back in and try to figure out what's actually going on, will you catch that there's more than technical genius here. I think what caught me first was Sonata en mi mineur, a six minute instrumental that's built out of flamenco guitars and orchestral waves. It's as far from technical death metal as you can imagine, but it's gorgeous. It's the realisation that the rest of the album is just more of the same, just faster, less accessible and with occasional death growls showing up to cheer it all on that prompts reevaluation.

So, yeah, this is a great album. How great I have no idea because I'll need to listen to it at least a dozen more times to properly grasp it, maybe more. It's technically brilliant, but it works not only as neo-classical metal but as jazz and funk and, damn it, a lot of this album frickin' swings. Really, my only complaint is that there are vocals. At all. I'm not complaining about the quality of David AB's contribution. He just doesn't need to be there, except maybe on the epic In'el. All I'm asking for is a second disc that's the same thing but entirely instrumental.

Wednesday, 20 January 2021

Mindwork - Cortex (2021)

Country: Czechia
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 22 Jan 2021
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Here's another submission, this time from Prague in Czechia and a band who are back at it after seven years away. Mindwork formed in 2007 and issued two studio albums before calling it a day in 2013. I'm not familiar with either, but I do like the thoughtful sound of this short EP, which marks a return for half of the former band, Martin Schuster on vocals and guitar and Filip Kittnar on drums.

Metal Archives describes Mindwork as progressive thrash/death metal and maybe they used to be but I'd call this straight up progressive metal. Their cited influences—Death, Cynic and Opeth—are all bands who grew from one genre to another, so maybe they've followed suit. The most obvious of them here is Cynic. I went back to their Traced in Air album from 2008 and it played well alongside this, as if the two bands were sharing a mindspace. Mindwork do let their inner death metal band come out and play on occasion, but I didn't find any thrash here at all.

Most of what manifests as death metal here can be found in Schuster's harsh vocals, though he sings cleanly more often and his harsh voice isn't particularly demonic. It's probably the weakest aspect to this album. The mix, also courtesy of Schuster, is clinical and clear, even during the heaviest parts of Depersonalized and Grinding the Edges. There's no attempt to hurl a wall of sound at us or bludgeon us with brutality. This is intricate and technical and, while it often finds grooves for us to respond to, the point is obviously for us to be able to hear everything that's going on in these songs.

The worst aspect to the EP is that it's short. There are only three songs proper on offer here, none of them long, so it's a mere taster of what Mindwork are up to nowadays and I hope it points the way to a third studio album sooner rather than later. Intros and outros are plentiful and comfortable builds too. Nothing is rushed and each song has the patience to be what it wants to be, though every one of them is over within five and a half minutes. There are no epics here, though it seems clear to me that Mindwork could easily write a single coherent piece of music that stays interesting for as long as this EP runs.

Even in its quietest and softest moments, which are not restricted to those intros, this seems acutely metal, but there's an alternate feel to the clean vocals midway through Last Lie Told. While Cynic has the undying heart of whover wrote these songs, it seems to me that he's also clearly been listening to Tool. I have no idea where the drum sound in the last thirty seconds of this song came from, but it's a startling creation. I wanted this EP to sound thicker and heavier but, the more I listen to it, the more I like this mix.

At this point, I can't even tell you which my favourite song is. Initially, it was Grinding the Edges with no competition. Then it was Depersonalized, with a guest solo from Bobby Koelbe, who played guitar on Death's Symbolic album. Last Lie Told was the also ran, but it refuses to leave me alone and, at this point, it may well have become my favourite. At least it's duking it out with Grinding the Edges and it may end up as a split decision. Let's just say that it's the patient listener who will be rewarded most.

Thursday, 30 April 2020

Ulcerate - Stare into Death and Be Still (2020)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Technical Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
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Most of my recommendations come from bands themselves, or their labels, as a part of their promotional push. Here's one from a reader, so thanks, Jo from Castelldefels, which suddenly makes me miss all the glorious food I devoured while in Barcelona way too long ago now. This is a fantastic album from down under, the first Kiwi death metal I've reviewed since Fall of Them just over a year ago. Jo calls it his album of the year and I do expect it to show up

It's a highly immersive album that's impossible to ignore. Listening is like being dragged into the underground by some eldritch creature that's allergic to light so that it can force its art upon us for an hour before letting us go, slithering away into the darkness while we wonder what just happened but remain somehow nostalgic for the surreal experience and hope for the rest of our lives that it'll happen again.

Amazingly, Ulcerate are only a trio because they generate quite a versatile soundscape with so few instruments. Paul Kelland is the man on double duty, his bass a dangerous texture lurking under whatever else is going on and his vocal arguably the lead instrument.

That bass sets a tone that I'd call dank if that hadn't been appropriated by stoners and rendered into meaningless cool. I think of it as a texture that engages multiple senses, like slime dripping off the walls of an underground cavern. It makes this feel dangerous. The vocals are deep and emotional, as if Kelland is that ageless creature railing against its confinement. He's a musical equivalent to Swamp Thing, looming and lost but ever magnetic.

Surprisingly, Kelland isn't the founder of Ulcerate. In fact, he's the new fish, having taken over from Phil Kusabs on bass in 2005 and Ben Read at the mike in 2008. Both his bandmates were there in the beginning in 2002, when a band of theirs called Bloodwreath renamed and set a new era into motion.

The guitarist is Michael Hoggard and he's wildly unusual. This isn't music built from riffs, let alone hooks. There are points where he crunches along in a complex riff but mostly he flits around above the music like a will o' the wisp, hurling out notes and melodic line almost with a hope that they'll have an effect, which of course they do. We might not recognise what he has in mind but he knows exactly what he's doing and that effect is massive.

And that leaves Jamie Saint Merat on drums, who must be a demon octopus. His contribution is just as unusual because he refuses to just keep the beat; he plays the drums like a lead instrument much of the time, generating melodies out of his fills and runs. I can't reconcile how accessible this seems given that it's so complex that we struggle to realise any semblance of structure. However many times I listen to this, I'm always stuck in the moment while it all washes over me.

I certainly couldn't pull out a favourite track. This album plays to me like a single hour long slab of art, an experience as much as a recording. Sure, its core is in death metal but it's often much slower than I expected it to be, not merely flirting with sludge and doom because atmosphere is king here and both those words are applicable as words as well as genres. It speeds up too, creating a wall of sound remiscent of black metal, even if the drums do not comply with that genre's standards. It's that dense.

Just in case it felt the need to elicit more praise, it's a generous slab of virtual vinyl. There are eight boulders of music here, the shortest of which is almost six minutes and the longest three over eight. It can't be easy to play live, given how long these pieces are, how untraditionally they are in structure and how complex every component part of the music is. However, the studio recording captures it all magnificently. It's raw emotion in extreme metal form. What an experience!

Tuesday, 26 November 2019

Exmortus - Legions of the Undead (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Technical Death/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Oct 2019
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Legions of the Undead is a neatly old school EP in that it allows a band to release a couple of new songs and add a bunch of odd stuff that wouldn't fit on a regular album as a bonus. That's what I remember EPs as being for but I don't believe any that EPs I've reviewed this year have done that until now. Thanks, Exmortus!

The new songs are Legions of the Undead and Swallow Your Soul, both of which sound good to me. I see Exmortus usually listed as technical thrash or death metal and this is kind of both together. Jadran Gonzalez uses a harsh voice that's not particularly extreme; it's a death growl but I've heard far more harsh from pure thrash metal singers in the past. While Swallow Your Soul is reasonably fast, it's not crazily so, and the title track is slower. This is far from frantic stuff.

The one word that rings truest from those genres is "technical", especially on the title track. This is a four piece band and they solo as much as they riff, so that there are melodies hurled out from all over. The bass of Cody Nunez is audible and welcome and Adrian Aguilar mixes up the rhythms a lot from behind the drumkit. While these songs aren't as fast as I tend to like my thrash or as evil as I tend to like my death, I thoroughly enjoyed both as heavy metal songs with extreme influences and I should look backwards.

Exmortus have been around since 2002 but didn't release an album until 2008. Last year's The Sound of Steel was their fifth studio full length and I see that they've generally been received well, sometimes very well indeed. They tend to focus more on war than traditional extreme subject matter, with war being from a more fantasy perspective: battles and heroism and glory, rather than the more historical bent of, say a Sabaton. If these two new songs are representative of their past material, I'm on board.

I'm actually even more on board because of the odd stuff that follows. I see that the band have featured at least one instrumental on each album and some of them have names that hint at a classical influence. Moonlight Sonata (Act 3)? Yeah, I think I know what that is. Appassionata? Yeah, I have an idea on that too. Here, Exmortus wrap up proceedings with three more notably varied instrumentals, finishing up with a very metal classical piece.

The first two are skimpy because they always have been, in the form of short movie soundtrack pieces. First up is Beetlejuice, the Danny Elfman theme you expect but rocked up massively with cool soloing over the refrains. Next up is Bernard Herrmann's memorable theme from Psycho, with shrieking guitars a highly appropriate replacement for shrieking strings. What's notable is that these two themes, written by other people for other purposes, fit well both with the original Exmortus songs here and the one classical track to follow.

That's Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, one of the most metal classical pieces of music ever written, both in its sound and its imagery, as it's an attempt to visualise a witches' sabbath. Exmortus aren't the first band to record it as metal but this version feels a lot closer to the original than the Accept version on Symphonic Terror. That's because the guitars of Conan Gonzalez and Chase Backer sound so much like a string section. They really do sound like witches in gleeful and frantic flight. Shenanigans are surely afoot. It's glorious stuff and it's a great way to wrap up a memorable EP.

Monday, 18 November 2019

Nile - Vile Nilotic Rites (2019)

In search of something decidedly heavy after the decidedly subdued new Quiet Riot album, here's album number nine from Nile, my very favourite Egyptology-obsessed technical death metal band. I've mentioned a few times how I prefer melodic death to brutal death but I dig Nile a lot. I think it's because the music they play is similar to the manuscripts they turn into lyrics, in that they're an eye catching mystery. I often find myself caught up in the whirl of their songs without much of a clue what's going on but somehow liking the experience anyway.

They're at their best for me when they're furious, which is fortunately most of the time. They slow down a lot on the opener, but the second song is wild and frantic from moment one. Just check out the start of The Oxford Handbook of Savage Genocidal Warfare and buckle in for a frenetic ride. The breakdown a couple of minutes in when they slow down to a crawl but quickly ramp back up to regular speed is absolutely glorious.

I should add that that's not a particularly unusual title for Nile. This is the band who, honest to Ra, released a single called Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks from He Who is in the Water. It was pretty damn good too. Maybe we should require them to stick to songs with insane titles because they're usually the best ones. Of course, naming a track Snake Pit Mating Frenzy is an exception to the length rule. How can that possibly be bad? Answer: it can't and its guitar runs are as sinuous and dangerous as they ought to be.

There are other reasons why I like Nile, but a lot of it is the complexity that dominates their songs. They speed up and slow down so much that it's an impossible task to figure out the rhythms. Listen to Seven Horns of War and throw out all your youthful dreams of becoming a drummer. It isn't just that George Kollias can play that fast, it's that he can switch tempos every time you snap your fingers. Sometimes I focus on his drums on Nile albums the way I do Neil Peart's on classic Rush songs.

One of those other reasons is that I like their vocal versatility. While all the singers deliver in a harsh death growl, they do so at different pitches and many songs are really duets that see them pass the vocal back and forth. Add in different styles like what sounds like a satanic choir on That Which is Forbidden and Nile become the textbook on how to deliver in brutal death style without boring us with vocals.

Another is the variety that extends to other aspects of their music.

It's there in the choice of instrumentation. Were those trombones on Seven Horns of War? I know that's a frickin' huge bell on a bunch of tracks. Main man Karl Sanders has been credited before with instruments I've had to look up, such as bağlama; I don't seeing any such credits this time out but the instrumental called Thus Sayeth the Parasites of the Mind is certainly not played on anything you can buy at Walmart. It serves as a fantastic ethnic introduction to the musical haboob, Where is the Wrathful Sky, which has an array of middle Eastern instrumentation under its guitar riff.

It's also in knowing how long the songs should be. The eleven on offer here range from just over a minute and a half to close to nine. Those in between vary wildly because none of them are interested in outstaying their welcome. If a song's done in two minutes, then it's done. If it needs eight to do its thing, then it'll have eight. That one's The Imperishable Stars are Sickened and it's the slowest and heaviest song on the album.

And, of course, they kick ass. I usually turn to thrash metal when I need to clean out my system, but Nile fit that need too. Snake Pit Mating Frenzy or Where is the Wrathful Sky would play well after anything from Reign in Blood for a double bill guaranteed to curbstomp your previous mood. Then throw on The Imperishable Stars are Sickened and you'll forget who you are. I'll visit you in the asylum.

It's been a few years since I've seen Nile live but they're touring again to support this album and I should get them firmly onto the calendar. They're already my favourite brutal death metal band and they keep on delivering of late. This is the best album they've done in quite a while.

Tuesday, 16 July 2019

Razorblades Terror - Return of the Crown (2019)

Country: Indonesia
Style: Technical Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Jul 2019
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I have a love/hate relationship with the brutal end of death metal, finding that a lot of it finds an interesting tone but does little more than drag it out for however many tracks are on any particular album or even a career. It might sound great on a first listen but it gets old really quickly for me, unlike melodic death metal which can change up from track to track if need be and add in all sorts of textures as it does so.

The closest I've got of late to brutal death metal that I really like is an Indonesian band by the name of Razorblades Terror, who play technical death metal. What that means is that they play with a brutal back end that's fast and downtuned but with a front end that's dominated by shredding guitarwork. The vocals are deep and growly, but are surprisingly versatile.

Most of this album is done at great speed. Fafa sets a relentless pace on the drums for Borky's bass to track. Whenever Tom pauses his growls, Dwy's fingers go dancing and we have frantic melody over frantic backing. On its own, that's pretty cool and I dig the sound.

But that isn't all that Razorblades Terror do and it's the rest that makes them special. For one thing, even though they're more brutal than melodic in tone, they construct their songs like melodeath bands. They introduce some variety on the opener, Binary of Gold, which follows a minute of blitzkrieg with a spoken word section and ends with a sort of choral crescendo that I presume is really done with keyboards.

Suckcial Media is what caught my attention. It's frantic, like most of this band's songs, but it gets much more varied than I expected. There are parts in the middle that transform into heavy power metal, with a slower approach, melodic riffing and more of that choral thing. And, as always, whatever goes on with the band, as fast and deep and brutal as they get, you can be sure that the guitarist is noodling along at high speed on his fretboard.

Dwy does this so much that there are points where he's still going as one song shuts down on him, so that he has to immediately carry on on the next one from where he left off. If there wasn't a pause between Suckcial Media and Racism Culture, I'd have thought they were the same song. This approach could easily have led to the album becoming one long repetitive track, but little touches of variety elevate the material.

The onslaught pauses in Racism Culture, for instance, for a lovely creeping bass run, something that happens in Death Prophercy too, among other points. Another is during a staccato section in Corps of Robot that highlights how capable each band member is, including whoever's handling the keyboards. If we doubted that there were keyboards, they get more obvious on Particle of Throne because there's clearly a piano in play and handled classically too. That returns for Death Prophercy and especially for Outro the Crown, which is an instrumental outro.

I enjoyed Return of the Crown a lot, finding that it energised me with its speed and brutality but kept my attention with its guitarwork and variety. It's probably important that Tom's voice didn't annoy me the way that a lot of brutal death metal vocalists do. He doesn't do anything new or ambitious, but he mixes things up a little by setting the tempo as effectively as the drummer.

The most obvious downside, for those who don't find this style repetitive, is the fact that the band's command of the English language, in which they sing, isn't particularly great. Of course, I have the same problem here in Phoenix, because most people can't conjure up coherent sentences any more, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to make of song titles like Particle of Throne, Binary of Gold or Corps of Robot. What's a Saliva Dealer and what's Candle Philosophy? I'm not sure that these things mean what they think they mean.

It really doesn't matter much, because Tom's vocals are not designed to be particularly intelligible, so confusedly looking over the track listing is about as problematic as it gets. No, that's not how Death Prophercy should be spelled. The catch is that, when Tom does appear to get intelligible, it doesn't work. The chorus on Suckcial Media sounds very much like "Everyone is daughter". I presume it isn't.

But hey, if that's all I can raise as a negative here, you know this is an impressive album! It's well written, well produced and well performed and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

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