Malice Divine - Everlasting Ascendancy

Die sexin'

In my eternal quest to understand why the generation that came after mine seems to be largely so uninterested in the same kinds of metal that I've spent my entire life in love with, I came across a strange criticism I'd never heard before.  I don't remember where I read it or what the subject of the criticism was, but I'd heard something slammed as a "one-genre album".  My gut instinct was to blame short attention spans curated by Vine and Tiktok, but upon further reflection I actually understand where whoever said that was coming from.  Metal bands and albums tend to, almost as a rule, be influenced almost exclusively by other metal bands.  I don't think the genre has hit any sort of Hapsburg level critical mass as of yet, and I don't personally think we're anywhere close to the genre going supernova any time soon, but I get the criticism and I get why it can be exhausting to sit through 45 minutes of blastbeats and/or tremolo riffs with no other inspirations to reach towards.

A good example of why this seemingly compulsory insularity hasn't started to wear on me personally is Malice Divine, a one-man project that rockets past the "one-genre album" and lands squarely on "one-influence album".  Everlasting Ascendancy is, from nose to tail, influenced by Dissection and absolutely nobody else.  The vocals sound like Dissection, the riffs sound like Dissection, the melodies sound like Dissection, this project sounds like one incredibly talented fanboy living out his fantasies of joining the band in an alternate timeline where Jon Nodtveidt didn't wind up in prison.  Where Storm of the Light's Bane leaves off, Everlasting Ascendancy picks up without even a smudged footprint in between with the biggest immediate difference simply being the production being much cleaner.  There are an abundance of acoustic passages to help break up the lengthy runtimes of each songs and the guitar solos are brain-punching exercises in melodic excess, but it all kinda blurs into a slurry of Dissectionisms that keep the songs themselves kinda hard to differentiate from one another. The reason this doesn't really bother me here is because, if you're gonna pull from one band almost exclusively, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Dissection.  Very few bands had as finely tuned an ear for the interplay between (and seamless blending of) razor sharp riffs and instantly memorable hooks, and Malice Divine has done a truly remarkable job of recapturing that magic.

The majority of the album is populated with acerbic scorchers, blistering past the listener at crazy speeds complemented by soaring guitar solos that sound like musical victory cries.  Even if there are technically a handful of songs that groove along at a more reasonable tempo and numerous contemplative sections of classical acoustic guitar, the overall impression that the album leaves you with is less of the complex interplay and dynamic push-and-pull of the songs and more akin to an impact crater.  Part of this is, as stated, simply because another band already did all of these things so it's easy to cluster all of these properties into one singular reference, but also simply because the fast, ruthless, pummeling parts with immediately singable hooks are far and away the strongest moments of the album.  The subtleties ultimately don't matter when they pale in comparison to the bombast.  Nobody appreciates the complex engineering of a bomb when it's currently detonating into a miles-high mushroom cloud.  I don't remember which songs have the prettiest acoustic passages or which solos are the most evocative, but I can rasp the chorus of "Apparitions of Conquest" back at you without even thinking about it.  All of these tracks are excellent the whole way through, only really beginning to lose their luster near the end.  "Reclaimed Strength" lacks the extremity of the rest of the songs and paradoxically fades into the background as a result (you'd think a change of pace would be welcome but Galvez is simply much better at in-your-face bombast), and "Illusions of Fragmentation" is the one track where I really think the runtime could and should have been trimmed, but the overall experience is enjoyable enough to not really be too much of an issue.

I suppose that's my main takeaway with Everlasting Ascendancy.  There are individual moments of cool things all over the place (I probably downplayed the non-Dissection influences too much, because there are shades of mid-era Immortal in the classically melodic moments and the opening of the title track is so overtly thrash influenced that it calls to mind Skeletonwitch in their prime) but when taken holistically, it feels much more simple.  And maybe it's because I'm just a big fat dummy, but the blurrier interpretation of the album, the one where everything just sloughs into a big Dissection-colored goulash, is just so, so much more satisfying than trying to manufacture more prominent diversity in the various moving parts.  One-genre albums still absolutely fucking rule.  Own it.

RATING: 84%