Arsis frustrates the fuck out of me. On one hand they released one of the hands down greatest albums in both tech death and melodeath simultaneously. A Celebration of Guilt bridged the gap between The Black Dahlia Murder and Necrophagist, and along the way it managed to craft some of the most enduring tracks in the genre. "The Face of My Innocence" alone justifies the band's existence all the way to the present day. They could've released that song as a single before replicating every Six Feet Under album in full and I'd still give them a shot whenever a new album came out. On the other hand, that's really the only time they managed to nail it. A Diamond for Disease is a great EP but it's basically the same idea as the debut, and it feels like it's coasting on that album's momentum. United in Regret was the point when the band began to stumble, with muddy production and a few bad ideas clogging up an otherwise good album. And in 2008 we met We Are the Nightmare, which signaled the moment they lost their balance completely and started tumbling down a mountainside.
The main problems with this album are both totally out of left field and completely logical. The previous album saw the beautiful cohesion of the band, despite their frantic technical ability, start to come apart at the seams. They held on for about half of the album, but there were more than a handful of moments where every instrument broke away from the meat of the song and orbited the emotional core while constantly colliding with each other. We Are the Nightmare is an album full to the brim with these moments. "Shattering the Spell" is a great example of this phenomenon, because nearly every second of that track sounds like four different guys trying to play four different solos at the same time, and instead of being chaotic in the good way, it's chaotic in the same way a room filled with four years olds on a collective sugar rush is. Comparing this particular song to Brain Drill is barely an exaggeration. I love flashy performances and I try to shy away from claiming that a band is doing a genre incorrectly, because it's presumptuous and stupid to assume that the band wants in their hearts to be Entombed but has so far failed to do so, but generally bands understand that you don't treat the drums like a lead instrument for the same reason you don't build a NASCAR with rear-axle steering. I should've seen this coming at the time because the band was definitely trending in the direction of total tech-metal overload, but it's still shocking because the precise reason Arsis was so good in the first place was specifically because they never did that.
The drumming is a huge problem here, and I think a lot of the blame can be laid at Darren Cesca's feet for this. Arsis has always been the brainchild of James Malone, but Mike Van Dyne was the secret genius behind the figurehead, and his spastic yet subdued drumming was a big reason why the songs where as catchy and memorable as they were during his tenure. I don't think it's a coincidence that as soon as the dude from Pillory took over, that backbone was snapped like Johnny Knox and suddenly the band's trademark infectiousness flew straight the fuck out the window. It's also worth noting that this was a weird era in metal criticism when nobody seemed to understand what drum triggers were and assumed it just meant the drums were programmed, and honestly I can't blame them for not knowing the distinction on this album since the performance is so robotically nonsensical and the triggers they used were so fucking unnatural sounding. Let's be real, death metal drums are rarely truly dynamic but here they are just constantly rattling around in the foreground louder than everything else by a sizable magnitude. Cesca treats his performance like a forty minute drum fill and it winds up being super distracting and aggravating.
We Are the Nightmare sports precisely three catchy choruses, which sounds like an odd complaint for a tech death album, but imagine a world where Dying Fetus pumps out an album with only three brain-squeezing slam-mosh riffs. This is what Arsis does, it's very much their thing. It's the entire reason that brilliant debut stuck with me as much as it did. Nobody else can craft songs where the riffs and solos are being played at the same time by the same guy and still have catchy sing-song choruses that are impossible to resist rasping along with. Tracks like "The Cold Resistance" and "The Sadistic Motives Behind Bereavement Letters" have vocal lines lifted straight out of a fucking Green Day record while still ripping faces off with molten fury. That simply doesn't happen here apart from the title track, "Servants to the Night", and "Failure's Conquest". The rest of the album is emblematic of everything the anti-tech death crowd claimed tech death was at the time.
It can be easy to forget since 2008 was twelve years ago now, but at the time tech death was really bundled with deathcore as the Bubba Ray and D-Von heel tag team of metal's Moral Panic Du Jour. Tech death in particular was seen by a lot of genre purists as a total bastardization of what made death metal so good in the first place because it completely erased the base riffing style of the parent genre and replaced everything with endless "wanking". Arsis, for a time, transcended that criticism because they were so cohesive and well put together, but We Are the Nightmare signaled them giving up on that and just joining the Deeds of Fleshes of the world by focusing on hyperfast technicality for the entire runtime. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because that era of tech death is great on its own merits and it's silly to compare it to Atheist or whatever for the same reason it's dumb to compare Hatebreed to Bad Brains, but it was a notable shift away from something unique and towards something trendy. Moments like the chorus of "Servants to the Night" are shining beacons of classic Arsis in a sea of nonsensical instrumental masturbation. It isn't bad because it's different, it's bad because it's really plain, which is something you could never accuse Arsis of being regardless of whether you liked them or not.
I'm contractually obligated to comment on the lyrics since I've made such a big stink about the hopeless Nice Guyisms that peppered Malone's lyrics on their previous work, but I honestly don't know how true it is this time. I'm thoroughly Brain Poisoned at this point so I can definitely make a case for how We Are the Nightmare continues the band's legacy of being the biggest Musical Madonna/Whore Complex in metal, but if that's true then it's at least more draped in metaphor than before. There are at least a couple of references to "three words" that either bind people or drive them to madness, which seems obvious enough since "three words" reference "I love you" in every instance of fiction ever written. Constant references to "silence" and people gladly watching somebody ruin their life can easily be interpreted as the narrator being bitter about his crush moving on with somebody else while everybody seems happy about it and only he notices the guy is a jerk, but I dunno. The endless callbacks to "shame" and "denial" and "sins" that happen "at night" are, if nothing else, a hell of a lot better than his whining about "your indifference" and a "wound" he desperately wants to "be inside", but if he's still on his friendzone bullshit I'll at least give him an A for effort in trying to obfuscate it this time. He only really drops the ball on "Progressive Entrapment" which is about as subtle as a kick in the taint but hey, he's trying.
I feel like it's no longer a hot take to call We Are the Nightmare the low point in Arsis's career. The muscianship is absolutely dazzling but at the end of the day, this one has the least amount of truly memorable songs, which is something at which the band was always stellar. The title track and "Servants to the Night" are great songs and I'll still go to bat for them, but they're the only worthwhile tracks among eight other chaotic blasts of meaningless spazzery. When they're on their game, Arsis can be one of the absolute best bands in their little niche, but when they're off, well, they release bland blasty sweepy nonsense like this. We know they can do better than this, and Malone's incredible strength of writing hooks is more or less squandered this time.
RATING: 48%
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