Devangelic - Xul

Come on you know what it is

I like opening my reviews with something more than the utilitarian band history that so many tend to open with.  Just a preference of mine, you and I probably don't actually care what country a band is from unless it isn't one of the obvious places like North America, Western/Eastern Europe, Japan, or Brazil, ya know?  So I sat here looking at the Metal Archives page for Devangelic, a brutal death metal band out of Italy, trying to find some sort of hook that wasn't some idiotic pasta pun or whatever, struggling to find a good cold open.  I found nothing.  But I did find that the bassist is also in a grindcore band called Buffalo Grillz, whose MA page has the helpful note clarifying that they were only added based on the album Martin Burger King, so that's pretty funny.

Anyway the real reason I'm stalling is because I'm trying to delay the inevitable comparison for as long as I can, because this review could feasibly be four words long and tell you everything you need to know.  Xul, the band's fourth album, is an exhilarating massacre of a record.  What immediately stood out to me was the guitar tone, which should mean something since I know fuck-all about recording and only care about tone if it's noticeably terrible, so for it to jump out as so good probably means something to people who understand better than I do.  It's overwhelmingly beefy, which a prominent low end that lends a ton of extra heft to the already pummeling assault coming from the rhythm section.  It's got this neat little quirk where a lot of the huge powerchords feel like the root and octave notes are just a teensy bit more emphasized than the fifth, and it gives these moments a sound I can only describe as "steely" and I promise it makes sense when you hear it.  Those huge moments contrast amazingly with how utterly devastating the lion's share of the music actually is.  If you look at the BDM scene as a gradient with slam on one end and tech death on the other, Devangelic is approximately one picometer away from being fully enveloped in the tech death color.  Make no mistake, Xul is devastatingly heavy and crushes everything in front of it, each of the eight "real" songs are delivered with such pummeling ferocity at such a blistering tempo that I genuinely worry that my headphones are gonna catch fire.  It reminds me a lot of their countrymates like Hour of Penance and Hideous Divinity, the type of raucous hyperdeath that doesn't really fuck around with complicated licks requiring Petruccian manual dexterity and instead opts to just blow forwards with enough kinetic energy to topple skyscrapers.  It's the type of death metal that kinda becomes tech death on accident simply due to how unbelievably fast it is, which came as a surprise to me when I skimmed reviews of their earlier work and saw them pegged as a Disgorge clone.

I think there's a secret weapon here that helps Xul's head rise above the BDM pack so far this year, and that's actually the frequent breaks in the action.  For as propulsively destructive as it is, Xul avoids becoming exhausting in its assault with frequent breaks for ambient mood-setting and drawn out bridges that let the scenery wash over the listener.  The opener, "Scribes of Xul", takes the time to set the table with 30 seconds of vaguely Egyptian spooky noises, and sports several sections where a big chord rings out while one guitar descends an echoey tremolo pattern, evoking the kind of dread when opening a long dormant and almost-certainly-cursed crypt.  Closer, "Sa Belet Ersetim Ki'Am Parsusa" utilizes similar tricks, while "Sirius, Draconis, Capricornus" kicks the tempo down with a more pronounced mid-paced pounding, with "Udug-Hul Incantation" being even more explicit.  And that's to say nothing of a track like "Which Shall Be the Darkness of the Heretic", which is an express train to Blast City that allows itself to stay interesting by simply shifting the precise angle at which the riffs are punching you.  It's the musical equivalent to that million hit combo from Fist of the North Star.  Two extended interlude tracks also give some much needed space to breathe as opposed to wasting my time like interlude tracks so often do.  

Have you figured out the four words I could've just used as a review?  Were the track titles alone enough of a giveaway?  That's right!  "This sounds like Nile!"

That isn't to say this is a knockoff or a worse version of the American legends, not at all!  In fact I'd take Xul over a solid third of Nile's discography, but the similarities are just too obvious to ignore.  I tried not mentioning Nile in the previous few paragraphs as a challenge to myself and lemme tell ya, those two short paragraphs took nearly an hour to write.  It would've been so much easier to compare the guitar tone to Annihilation of the Wicked, compare Paolo Chiti's incredibly deep roars to Karl Sanders's incredibly deep mummy moan, the insane speed and variety of the percussion to George Kollias, the epic moments to the exact type of epic moments that Nile uses all the time, the ambient interludes sounding like one of Karl's solo albums, it's all right there.  Nile casts a tremendous shadow over this album and it's pervasive.  Every single element has a direct 1:1 comparison to some aspect of Nile's classic sound, and that makes my job as a reviewer super fuckin' difficult because all I needed to do was say it sounds exactly like Nile with no deviations and that would've been that.  However you feel about Ithyphallic or Those Whom the Gods Detest should be exactly how you feel about Xul, and if you've stumbled across this album in the first place, chances are you're familiar enough with the genre to be acquainted with Nile's work already.

So as a guy who really likes Nile, their middle era from Shrines thru Detest in particular, I also really like Xul.  It's hard to articulate because there's always an implied negative to being so similar to one band in particular (hard to avoid implying a band lacks creativity in that context ya know?), but in this case the worship actually saw some tangible rewards handed from the gods since this is on the exact level of quality that Nile churns out on the regular, and it turns out that having more bands making killer music just means more bands are making killer music.  

RATING: 81%

Grave Miasma - Abyss of Wrathful Deities

A meandering fart-cloud of non-riffs

It might be easy to forget if you weren't around at the time, but back in Grave Miasma's heyday they were a Big Fuckin' Deal.  The term "caverncore" has fallen out of favor in recent years (likely because it sounds like a pejorative, though personally I use it value-neutrally) but when that style was first really blowing up about a decade ago, Grave Miasma was one of the earliest bands to really show how to do it well.  Heaps of influence from Incantation, murky production, chaotic songwriting, particular attention paid to atmosphere, all the tropes were codified in part by these guys back when the wave was beginning to swell.  Their debut full length, Odori Sepulcrorum stands as a classic in the little microgenre they occupy, so their long awaited followup, Abyss of Wrathful Deities, has been one of the most anticipated albums of the year for death metal fans.

I'm five or six listens down at this point, and what this has really done has reaffirmed my belief that Grave Miasma was always the least interesting of these early studs.  Obviously they can't sniff the socks of Incantation, but when it comes to their peers, the two they are most often compared to outshine them in every way.  Dead Congregation and Cruciamentum seem to be spiritually tied to Grave Miasma, all three of whom are examples of early bands showcasing this new breed of Incantation influence and having an agonizingly slow release schedule, but the former two are a hell of a lot better when it comes to crafting memorable experiences.  Dead Congregation throws curveballs all the god damned time, never tipping their hand as to what the next section of music is going to bring, lurching frantically between fast and slow moments and clobbering you over the head with morbid nastiness at every turn.  Cruciamentum hunkers down into vicious grooves and rides out musical anxiety attacks with razor sharp riffage cutting through the thick atmosphere.  Grave Miasma, on the other hand, is just that, a miasma.  It's thick and noxious and just kinda floats around without any real purpose.

It's a shame because obviously I really enjoy bands that are very similar to this idea, it takes very little tweaking to change an album like Abyss of Wrathful Deities into Graves of the Archangels, but those tweaks haven't been made here.  There's very little actual excitement to be found on this album.  I personally hate the argument of "it all sounds the same!" because it's almost always said by somebody who has no idea what they're even looking for, but man it's true this time.  Like, sure there are tempo shifts across and within songs but they all somehow sound like they're the same speed.  "Rogyapa" starts with an incredibly intense drum fill before flying into a screaming Kerry King style solo, but the riff underneath is just some walking tremolo patterns while the drums technically fire away with high speed double bass, but the snare and cymbals are placed very far apart in the pattern, giving the illusion that the section is moving much slower than it actually is.  This could be a neat effect but it feels so woefully misplaced when the rest of the album is actually as slow as this particular section feels.  It's rare that the tempo truly feels above mid paced, instead meandering between strolling and trotting and as a result the whole thing just drags.  It feels like it's holding itself back whenever it tries to break free.  It turns the album into a hazy slog where thirty minutes can pass by without me noticing a single interesting thing happening.

Grave Miasma is the type of band to focus on atmosphere above riffs, and while that isn't necessarily my preference, it's still totally valid and can produce some excellent shit (see the other bands I've namedropped here).  The problem is that the atmosphere on display here is very monotonous.  This is the same fuckin' problem I have with Ulcerate, we do not need 53 minutes of the same damn idea in a row.  The actual elements change of course, they aren't literally playing the same riffs in the same order at the same speed on every track, but when the effect of each song is functionally identical then they might as well be.  My old analogy about a long rollercoaster applies here as well; there may be a lot of twists and turns and starts and stops but at the end of the day you're really just doing the same loop-de-loops on the same track over and over again.  I'm always worried when every track on an album is basically the same length for this exact reason and that's the case here as well.  Of the eight non-interlude tracks, six of them are within the six minute window, while one is ten seconds short and the other ten seconds over.  They wind up playing with the same ideas with the same tempos for the same general length of time on each track and holy shit why should I be invested in that for nearly an hour?

I wish I liked this, because I adore Grave Miasma's peers and influences, but they've always managed to whiff the execution for me, and eight years after Odori Sepulcrorum I find myself up against the same problems again.  This is overwhelming in a negative way, just the same brown air languidly wafting back and forth for an extended period of time with no actual punch to direct it in any real direction.  And that's just really, really, really fucking boring.

RATING: 39%

Ultima Weapon - Spira

Go away
 

For this winter edition of the Diamhea Challenge, I am only going to be reviewing bands and albums that reference Final Fantasy in some way.  Why?  Because it's a stupid thing to do and I love doing stupid things.

So we're gonna start today with Ultima Weapon, one of Jared Moran's ten gazillion shitty half-hearted projects.  If you're unfamiliar with the guy, Moran is one of those special types of metalloids who has several dozen one-man-bands that all sound more or less the same, releasing new material under rotating names at an alarmingly high clip.  Sometimes they're a bit more grindy, sometimes they're a bit doomier, but I've stumbled across like eight of his projects over the years and each one reads the same.  It's lo-fi death metal with songs that sound like they were finished in a half hour and there's really nothing more you can say about them because that's all they are.  His output is functionally identical to Bob Macabre or Rogga Johansson if he didn't have any friends.

I walked into this with the intention of making stupid FF-nerd jokes about like "'Ronso Rage' sure is a fitting name since the main riff is a total copy of 'Liege of Inveracity' by Suffocation" and "This is probably such a weak release because they based it on the FFX version of Ultima Weapon, which is the shittiest one in the franchise", but once I realized this was a Moran band my mindframe completely shifted because who the fuck cares?  He's less a Weapon and more of a Mimic, because I thought I had blundered into a potential gem since it's so rare to hear metal based on videogames that aren't just straight up covers, but then I opened the chest and fuck it's the same shitty scratchy BDM he always pumps out.  It's a short eleven minute blast of mid-paced kinda-slammy death metal with no lasting impact shat out by a guy who has done this exact thing literally dozens of times.  There's only one sentence of musical description in this review because that's all it's worth and if you listen to it yourself you'll agree.

For good BDM that is super tangentially related to FF just stick to Jenovavirus.

RATING: X%

10 YEAR REUNION: Vader - Litany

Furious Blasting Death

This is actually a fairly difficult album to write about.  Not because it's bland or uninteresting (far from it), but because Vader is a pretty simple and direct band on their best days and I'd argue that Litany is also their most simple and direct album.  That's a pretty weighty charge on a band that also released Black to the Blind, The Beast, and The Empire, but as of this particular moment I think I'll stand by it.  Litany is a front to back banger but boy howdy is it exactly what it says on the fuckin' tin.

Vader has basically been coasting on attitude since the beginning, because even at their best (which is top tier) they don't do a whole lot of super creative things with their template.  They start with Furious Blasting Death and then just keep doing it for varying amounts of time.  Every once in a while there are more superficially epic things thrown in like some swelling strings or choral ooohs but even then it's happening over the top of more Furious Blasting Death.  And all that is said with the caveat that none of it appears on Litany.  No, this is just Furious Blasting Death for barely a half hour and there isn't anything else I'd rather it be.  Vader is on a whole other level when it comes to packing as much fury and aggression into everything they do, and something like the title track is basically the perfect representation of this.  It's called "Litany", the lyrics are literally a litany, it cycles through the same two or three riffs for three minutes and then fucks off to let the rest of the album shine, and that's Vader in a nutshell.  They never seemed like the type of band that elbows their way to the forefront as much as they just sit back and do what they do best and people can't help but take notice.  Vader's greatest strength as a band is carrying a hefty set of testicles and then never tripping over them, instead using them as a blunt weapon to beat you into submission.

Vader was my gateway into extreme metal, and I suspect the reason they were so good for this is because they are absolute masters of the hook.  Twenty one years later I can still only think of maybe a handful of albums that toe the line between chaotic violence and fine-tuned hookiness as well as this does.  A track like "Wings" doesn't happen on its own.  The upside-down windmill-punches of the riffs and percussion complement the simple hooks in a way that had to have been achieved with black magic.  The breakdown of that particular track is quite possibly the most devastating twenty seconds ever laid to tape and somehow manages to be a rousing anthem that crowd can't help but hoarsely shout along with.  "Xeper" achieves a similar effect by dropping the guitars for a few bars in the verses, allowing the propulsive double bass to continue the momentum during catchy syncopated vocal lines.  That's a fucking pop trope, Sabaton has basically made a living off of that, and here we have Polish death metal legends pulling it off so flawlessly in a context where it absolutely has no right being effective.  I think it brilliantly showcases Vader's phenomenal handling of their instrumental talent.  These guys came up in the early days of the genre, to the point where the thrash flavorings of Kreator and Slayer are never all that far away from what they're doing, and they frequently push the tempo to absurd levels of hyperspeed, but they know when to rein it in and swap the minigun for a jackhammer.  Nobody has ever been able to truly fill Doc's shoes behind the kit, and he shows off with absolutely dizzying fills and a bass drum tone so obnoxiously boomy that my wife referred to "Wings" as "death metal techno" once.  It concusses the god damned atmosphere.  He's front and center on Litany and his percussion is absolutely the JATO unit on the back of these riffs that make the album so god damned powerful.  The laws of physics absolutely should not allow something this heavy to move this fast, it's like if Brock Lesnar was a drumstick.  You know how in Grand Theft Auto games you can achieve absolutely bonkers speed by driving a tank and constantly shooting the turret behind you? That's Litany.

Litany is not without its flaws though.  I'll frequently put this at the top of the pecking order when it comes to Vader's discography but there's really no way around the fact that the A side absolutely obliterates the B side.  "Wings", "Xeper", "Litany", and "Cold Demons" are four of Vader's all time best songs, but they're positioned as tracks 1, 3, 4, and 5.  The back half of the album is the exact kind of faceless blur that their worst albums exemplify.  I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the best songs are more mid length, and that's actually kind of bizarre considering how blistering and destructive the music is.  You'd figure lightspeed maimings would be the order of the day but they're really at their best when they're giving these tracks some time to breathe and stretch out.  There are three tracks in a row in the back half that barely break 90 seconds, and I can't help but feel like the album would've been better off if they had just been cut and the band waited an extra year to write the best songs from Revelations instead.  These songs are by no means bad but they're definitely lesser than the utter behemoths that get the album started.  They pick up enough momentum early on for those weaker songs to not really matter all that much but if you were the type to score albums via some sort of math equation then this stretch would definitely throw a wrench in things.

Thankfully, I'm not that kind of critic, and I think the weaker back end of Litany can be more or less ignored since it keeps the pace up well enough to not really hinder anything, and the rerecording of "The Final Massacre" that closes the album out is so fucking monstrous that you can easily be tricked into forgetting that "North" was even here.  This album is greater than the sum of its parts and that's mindblowing considering how great the parts are to begin with.  Blastbeats and single note tremolo riffs have never sounded so superlative.

RATING: 90%

Ulcerate - Stare Into Death and Be Still

Double Doink!

My relationship with Ulcerate is somewhat similar to the relationship Charlie Brown has with Lucy's football.  Every few years, they release another album to widespread acclaim, so I take the snap and then whiff the kick as they pull my football-shaped enjoyment away at the last second.  I want to like Ulcerate.  They're one of the most important metal bands in recent memory, their discography is very consistent, they've influenced a multiplicity of young death metal bands, they're chaotic and unrelenting, on paper they are just everything I want in a metal band nowadays.  And for whatever reason they've just never vibed with me.

Stare into Death and Be Still is different while being exactly the same.  This time I actually made contact with the ball and even managed to avoid a ridiculous Scott Norwood shank.  It's not pretty, and I hit the post, but dammit I put three points on the board!

What makes this different from other seminal works of theirs that I never managed to care about like Everything is Fire or Shrines of Paralysis is pretty difficult to pinpoint, because this really isn't all that different.  It's still an unrelenting deluge of cataclysmic percussion and dissonant guitars that don't really riff as much as they whir and clang.  Maybe the guitar tone is a bit beefier and less scratchy?  Maybe the songs themselves are simply more well constructed?  Their approach to songwriting is just as non-euclidian as ever but the flow feels a bit more natural to me this time around.  Ulcerate always had a strange Uncanny Valley feel to them, where their songs always yawned and swayed like organic creations but felt lifeless and stiff at the same time, like saltwater frying a fish's nerves and causing it to flop and spasm long after it dies.  Stare into Death and Be Still simply managed to catch a live one, I think.  Like always, this is much more about overarching atmosphere than riffs or hooks, and as a result the whole experience tends to feel like one long song instead of a collection of them.

And if you'll allow me to mix my sports metaphors, I think the reason this isn't quite a home run despite some solid contact is exactly this.  There are tons of twists and surprises within the riffs themselves, but rarely within the wider context of a song or the album.  58 solid minutes of this suffocating atmosphere is just that, suffocating.  That absolutely works at times but around the second act of this behemoth it goes from exhilarating to tedious.  It's like the coaster I built in Rollercoaster Tycoon when I was 9 that had like fifty inversions and took twelve minutes to finish.  Sure there are subtle variations in tempo and approach on Stare into Death and Be Still, but ultimately you're just doing the same loop-de-loops over and over again on the same track for an uncomfortably long time.  Each successive Ulcerate album has been a few minutes longer than the one preceding it, and that trend continues here, and I really think it's to the album's detriment.  Despite all eight tracks basically feeling like the same long song, it's still quite noticeable that only two of them run for less than seven minutes.  This wouldn't be a problem if it felt like the songs were actually leading somewhere, but after repeated listens the only time I can truly pick out a song with a climax is "Drawn into the Next Void".  The rest of it sounds like sonic flash rust, standing still and deteriorating before my eyes despite the immaculate craftsmanship put into the initial product.  Every Ulcerate album tends to spin its wheels to some degree, and admittedly Stare into Death and Be Still manages to get a good amount of traction and actually move forward, but a lesser degree of the same problem is still the same problem.

When Everything is Fire dropped in 2009, I recall the buzz around it at the time being something akin to "It's Deathspell Omega but death metal", and I see where that statement is coming from.  But the key difference to me is that for as anarchic and chaotic as DsO can be, they always have a point to make and more often than not they do it very well.  Some of this boils down to my own personal preference, since I notably tend to prefer my death metal to be a bit more pugilistic than textural, but the fact that I like Portal well enough tells me that Ulcerate simply struggles to reach their destination at times.  I would definitely say I have a positive impression of Stare into Death and Be Still overall, but the problems that have always plagued the band haven't really been ironed out here.  They made it work more than usual, but at the end of the day I can't help but think this heavily atmospheric style of dissonance simply fits more naturally in a black metal context and a shorter package, and that's why Serpent Column absolutely wrecks my shit while Ulcerate merely manages a brisk foot tapping.

RATING: 56%

10 YEAR REUNION: Arsis - We Are the Nightmare

GET THE TABLES

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%

Sutrah - Aletheia

Bali of the Beast

I seem to recall a few years ago, Sutrah were one of the names tossed around the death metal scene as one of the big up-and-comers to look out for.  Dunes was a pretty big hit in the proggy tech death scene, allowing the band to be mentioned in the same breath as genre heavyweights like Beyond Creation and other newcomers invariably linked to Phil Tougas like Cheth'ilist, Zealotry, and First Fragment.  Now, in all honesty, I've never listened to Dunes so I don't really know if Aletheia is a big departure or not, but whatever it is, it's pretty solidly good.

Aletheia is just a short, four track EP that clocks in under 30 minutes, which it turns out is a pretty perfect length for this style.  Sutrah play tech death, sure, but they take a slightly more proggy and experimental approach than most of their peers.  They're more in line with the jazzy prog of Cynic or Atheist than the neoclassical shred of Necrophagist or Origin or something, with a dash of the intentionally weird and dissonant style Gorguts has been pushing for decades at this point.  You're probably surprised considering my noted dislike of Cynic and Gorguts, but I dunno, something about Sutrah just works.  Most of the time.

Y'see, this EP is structured in a pretty deliberate way, with the first two tracks being subtitled "Variations I.i" and "Variations I.ii", and the second two tracks following the same pattern except being "II.i" and "II.ii", so clearly this is meant to be a more flowing experience with both "songs" being broken up into two tracks each.  The problem with this as that both ".i" tracks tend to act as overtures/intros, and the actual metallic meat of both songs resides in the ".ii" segments.  And then with that, "II.ii" (from this point on I'll be using the tracks' given names, so in this instance: "Genèse") is over fifteen minutes long, taking up more than half of the record by itself.  Obviously it doesn't run on one theme or idea the whole time, it's a twisting journey that crawls all over the place with tons of different moods and melodies, even opening on a very creative two minutes where distorted guitars are played like violins, what with the swelling harmonies akin to a full orchestra and all.  So like... why not break this one up further since it clearly ends in a place so different to where it starts?  It's not like it would've broken the flow of the song at all since its to kinetic and interesting.  Otherwise why bother with the subtitling gimmick in the first place?  It's such a minor thing but it utterly confounds me.  Because of this I can't help but kinda brush the instrumental tracks off to the side because they feel like a needless runup to the more interesting tracks they precede.  "Lethe" and "Genèse" are both fantastic exercises in proggy brutality, but they feel hindered by tacked on appendages that add very little to the main meal itself.  Even more confusing is that "Genèse" works extremely well on its own while the first three tracks all flow into one another.  This is just a bewildering choice, and while it doesn't really affect the music itself, it just seems totally nonsensical to me.

But when they're on, they're on.  The buildups seem tacked on and superfluous, but I'd be lying if I said "Umwelt" doesn't build itself extremely well, and the explosion when "Lethe" finally starts is quite satisfactory.  "Lethe" and "Genèse" are clearly the stars of the show here, pulling a lot of influence from Lykathea Aflame.  It's not a perfect 1:1 comparison since the melodies aren't nearly as happy and major key here, but Sutrah flourishes with a very shiny production job and busily triumphant melodies interspersed with spiritual chants and flat out brutality.  The vocals are deep and monstrous while the riffs and drums pummel you with manic ferocity.  All the while the tracks twist and dive into new territory with relative (but not overwhelming) frequency, helping to mitigate the two problems this style frequently deals with (that being the songs being too samey to differentiate or jumping around so often that the beginning and ending of each track doesn't really matter).  When they give their songs a little room to breathe, they can craft some genuine magic, and I'm pretty enthralled by what they create on a track like "Genèse".  There's apparently a lot of influence from Balinese music, including instruments I've never heard of like the reyong and gangsa, but they aren't weird enough for me to really pick out in the music.  So I'll have to just accept that I'm a dummy and reduce the album down to "really good but kinda weird death metal with tons of melody".

So yeah, I'm on the Sutrah train now.  They play a style I don't usually go googoo over but I can't help but enjoy this quite a lot, the closing track in particular.  Aletheia is very proggy and highly melodic, but unlike Beyond Creation they create some wonderous soundscapes with the tools they're given, and turn what could've easily been overbusy progdeath into something very focused while also encompassing a pretty wide scope.  I dunno man, I like it a lot.


RATING: 84%

Possessed - Revelations of Oblivion

Bitch, siddown, be humble

I'm going to be disgustingly frank with y'all here.  I'm writing this for two reasons alone.  One is because I'm ageist as fuck when it comes to metal and I really wish the legacy bands would just go the hell away and make room for the young bands with fresh ideas to actually take a fucking foothold in the scene before all of the old fogeys die and metal as a genre goes the way of doo-wop because metalloids are terrified of change.  And the second reason is because I just really want to get 100 posts on the year.

So Possessed was kind of an easy choice for me when I wanted to make this argument.  It's been 33 years since their last LP, and in the interim they've either been broken up or busy releasing meaningless singles.  And exactly as I suspected, it was hailed as pretty uniformly great by critics and fans in the corners of the internet I hang out in.  I've seen this movie before, it happens every fucking time Overkill or Judas Priest releases something.  Classic band releases a mediocre album and gets showered in accolades because they were great thirty years ago and didn't release Illud Divinum Insanus, and apparently that's all that's necessary to wind up sweeping Album of the Year lists across the net.  Fuck this shit, move over and let Xoth shine or something.

And that's why this is such a humbling experience for me, because against all prejudice, Revelations of Oblivion is actually pretty fucking excellent in many ways.  I think between this and the new Nocturnus album this year, I'm starting to question my long-held stance outlined above.  Maybe the issue isn't that old bands need to go away and stop hogging all the limelight, maybe they just need to write albums as great as Revelations of Oblivion in order to justify the instant praise they get.

For a band that's been more or less dormant for longer than I've been alive, this is pretty much the best album I could've expected out of them.  Despite most of the band being a few heartbeats away from being able to order off the senior menu at Denny's (barring guitarist Daniel Gonzalez, who is only in his late thirties) there is a hell of a lot of youth in the sound here.  The adrenaline is off the charts, and the pace stays consistently high.  The overall feeling of this album is just fuckin' ferocious, with razor sharp riffs tearing through at nearly all times and drumming that feels like a tommy gun.  There's definitely a feeling of aged professionalism in how tight the riffs and songs are, but that youthful energy that keeps things sounding wild and dangerous actually never left the band.  This is no replacement for Seven Churches, mind you, but it is worthy of the legacy, which is something I never thought I'd say.  Tracks like "Ritual", "The Word" and "No More Room in Hell" rip like motherfuckers.  This is that perfect nexus point between thrash and death metal that Possessed pretty much nailed all by themselves way back in 1985, and for once being timelocked in such an era is a huge boon to the album since they're clearly really fucking good at it.  Also worth noting that the solos are fucking incredible.  Every time these two guys let loose they melt face, and they're the clear highlight of the album to me.

This isn't perfect, however.  There are a few flaws that keep this album from being truly exceptional.  The biggest problem is easily the length.  Death metal almost never needs to be nearly an hour long, and twelve tracks of such a non stop assault just feels like overkill.  Yeah I know two of them are instrumental intro/outro tracks, but it certainly doesn't make the album feel any less daunting.  The songs themselves tend to feel longer than they actually are and I feel like that's merely the fault of the songwriting getting kinda repetitive at times (I swear the chorus of "Demon" loops like fifty times throughout the song).  The mix is pretty overwhelming as well, with Jeff's surprisingly clean thrash-like vocals absolutely dominating the space, with the rest of the band taking a distant-yet-still-crazy-loud second place.  So it's not particularly dynamic, but in fairness this is death metal so that'd be a crazy thing to expect this to be super varied or something.  Really the complaint is just that the vocals are stupid loud.

So overall I gotta eat my foot a little bit.  Legacy bands definitely still have a place in the current zeitgeist of metal music, and I wouldn't complain one bit if they were all as good as Revelations of Oblivion.  This doesn't bring anything new to the table and Jeff Becerra certainly hasn't spent the past few decades evolving much as an artist or vocalist, but when "Abandoned" is on, I just find myself looking in the mirror and saying "Ya know what, BH?  Who fucking cares?"  This is what Possessed is good at, and if they can keep this momentum while trimming some of the needless fat and repetition, they really and honestly could reclaim the death metal crown that they invented all those years ago.


RATING: 81%

Creeping Death - Wretched Illusions

Who is this for?

I checked this out for one reason and one reason alone, and that's that The Absolute Boy Arthur Rizk handled the mixing and mastering.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, the man is the Scott Burns of this generation and everything he gets his hands on sounds perfect.  Creeping Death is no exception, because Wretched Illusions sounds absolutely gargantuan and every single riff carries the weight of mountains on their backs.  Rizk knocked it out of the park yet again, to the surprise of nobody.

The issue that arises here is that the band themselves... well, they kinda suck.  Or maybe they don't suck, but they are wholly unnecessary.  This is very similar to Genocide Pact's Order of Torment last year, and I have basically all of the same criticisms.  Despite the tempo shifts and pummeling drums, all ten tracks here are remarkably static.  There are occasional bursts of speed and occasional slow parts, but they do little to change the actual momentum of whichever track they appear on.  Wretched Illusions is just plain ol' death metal in the most generic and uninteresting sense.  We're in the middle of an apparently decade-long groundswell of bands aping the styled of death metal classics from the 90s, and due to the oversaturation of young artists deliberately treading well-covered ground we're bound to get bands like Creeping Death; bands that do nothing to push the style forward or stand out with exceptional songwriting and/or markedly high levels of adrenaline (Skeletal Remains is an example of a band that does absolutely nothing new but stands out as great anyway).  I'll give them a little credit for at least not doing the caverncore thing of ripping off Incantation as shamelessly as possible like was popular for a while there, but they fall into a pretty dangerous trap of trying to focus more on mid paced death metal than anything else.  Slow/midpaced extreme metal is incredibly hard to write because you really have no idea if the final product is going to be crushing/groovy/punishing or if it's going to be boring as hell until it's past the point of no return.  You really don't know if you're going to hit the level of Bolt Thrower or Autopsy until it's too late, I reckon.  Creeping Death can't even sniff the britches of Autopsy.  And the blistering fast parts are agonizingly short and spaced out, so you go crazy lengths of time toiling around in meandering chugs waiting for the actually intense parts to start.

Who does this appeal to?  Who has such poor quality control that they can hear such nakedly mediocre death metal and think "yo this fuckin SLAPS"?  Everything about this is bland.  Even the cool parts are stuff I've heard a thousand times before.  They rock when they pick up the pace but man why not just listen to Dismember, ya know?  The title track and "Corroded from Within" are pretty great but the rest of it is just lame.  I can't imagine writing a song as unimaginative as "Consumed" and feeling confident sending it to press.  Maybe I'm just being overly harsh, it is a bit more dynamic than some of their peers, but the classics are classics for a reason and if you're going to take most of your influence from them then please at least do something exciting with them.


RATING: 43%

Xoth - Interdimensional Invocations

Jez Xoth

This was a hard one to pin down aesthetically, while at the same time being super obvious.  On one hand, between the band name and the weird tentacled eyeball on the cover, it was pretty obvious there'd be some Lovecraft influence involved here, but with the mechanical looking portion of the logo and the song titles I also figured this would be very sci-fi influenced (not that Lovecraft never dabbled in that himself but it's not necessarily what he's known for), and the general look and feel of everything pointed to some kind of Rings of Saturn styleded "aliencore" stuff where it's just absurdly techy and wild.  But if you don't overthink it like I did, Xoth is very much what it says on the tin.  Their logo is a blend of those two things because musically they're a blend of those two things, and the colorful album art is indicative of the almost comic book style over-the-topness of the whole thing.  And frankly?  They absolutely fucking rule.

I'm just gonna spoil the ending a bit right at the start and say that Interdimensional Invocations is actually one of my favorite releases I've heard all year, which is extra impressive considering it's death metal.  Obviously death metal is generally my favorite subgenre but it's been lagging behind trad and black metal in 2019, so for this relatively unknown group out of Seattle to come out and absolutely fucking trounce most of the heavyweights this year is definitely notable.  I think a big reason this stands out so much is because it takes a lot of influence from bands that aren't ripped off nearly enough, namely Mithras and Sarpanitum.  Interdimensional Invocations is bursting at the seams with screaming leads and hooky melodies all over the place, constantly flying over the blast heavy necromancy underneath.  This is very flashy, and they do it in such a way where they don't sound like guitar nerds jerking off over how fast they can sweep.  Instead each and every song is just incredibly solid hyperspeed death metal that just so happens to have ear catching fretboard abuse on the top. 

While they don't neglect the meaty riffs here, they're obviously secondary to the spiraling melodies.  I hear a lot of The Sound of Perseverance era Death in here, but they're not quite technical and wanky enough to be compared to Decrepit Birth (another great band that takes influence from there).  Those almost power metally leads of late era Death are filtered through a Mithras mindset.  It's kind of hard to explain if you aren't familiar with them or their sister project Sarpanitum, but basically what that means is that the leads take center stage over the rhythmic element of the band and they tend to be a bit more simple than the tech death wank you'd usually associate with such a description.  Check out "Mountain Machines".  That main lick is very simple, it's just a walk up and down the fretboard with some bends/slides and that's it, but it's so epic.  It sounds huge, like just sitting in my chair and listening to this in my living room makes me feel like I'm about to fight the final boss and the future of humanity is on the line.  "Melted Face of the Soul" and "Plague Revival 20XX" are exactly the same, and the solo in "Haruspex" is pure late 90s Schuldiner.  So even when it's more complex, the leads are all gigantic and exciting.

That's not to say the rest of the band is lesser than the guitarists of course.  Ben Bennett's (best known for briefly playing in Warbringer during their best era) bass is pangy and would be distracting in most contexts, but here the whole thing is so high-flying and wild that it just adds to the absurdity of the whole thing and I'm in love with it.  I know "bass just following the guitars" is par for the course in metal today, but even then it'd be really impressive if he just did that, but he doesn't.  He floodles and bloodles around all over the place but it manages to not be distracting with the hundred other things going on at once.  Everything comes together extremely well in the end and honestly there isn't one moment of Interdimensional Invocations that I don't love wholeheartedly.  This is one of those bands that was seemingly created specifically for me.  Hopefully you love it as much as I do.


RATING: 93%

Desecresy - Towards Nebulae

OOOOOG OOOOOOG

I'm not sure if I've ever really made it clear or not, but when it comes to regional death metal scenes, I actually find Finland to be one of the worst.  Weird right?  I don't deny that it's certainly one of the most instantly recognizable, with the frequent influence from doom metal lending to some crushing slow sections and the ever-looming spectre of Demilich over the entire scene pushing everybody to sound like their instruments were formed out of an alien swamp, but I'm going to pick America or Sweden every fucking time if given the choice.  The thundering megalith that is Nespithe is one of the only things out of that entire scene that's really stood the test of time to me (alongside Adramelech's debut and that one Rippikoulu demo) while everything else runs the gamut from "alright I guess" to boring to bad.  I don't really plan on justifying myself further, but hopefully this should elucidate why I'm so fucking lukewarm about the "Timelich" style that's gotten so popular in recent years.

Anyway, enter Towards Nebulae, which isn't an exact representation of the particular strain of death metal I'm talking about, but is pretty close and shares the aforementioned ancestral homeland.  While this is slightly more grounded and less abjectly fuckin' weird than Demilich, it does share some of the same distant, alien qualities that ties Finndeath together.  Seriously, these leads sound like they're being broadcast from GN-z11.  And hey man I like the idea of something sounding completely foreign, but the problem is that any extraterrestrial creativity Desecresy showcases is drowned out by some frustratingly unengaging riffs and some straight up fucking terrible vocals.

The main guy here, Tommi (formerly of Slugathor, probably the closest sonic comparison) has been "the guy" behind Desecresy since the beginning, but it was actually a two-man band for the first four albums.  While I haven't heard any of those albums, I can only assume he's world's better, he has to be.  Tommi here sounds like a cross between Rami Jamsa from Convulse and your dad making fun of the music you like.  He sounds like he was born without a tongue and has a massive underbite and then just whispers really angrily.  There is no power in that voice, and frankly the music doesn't fare much better.  This is about as muscular as a plate of Jell-O, and these grinding, mid-paced riffs that take up a huge chunk of the runtime sound like they're aiming for a doomy overtone like Asphyx or Krypts but instead just land on weak and amateurish.  There's also a bizarre disconnect between the several instruments at play, each one sounding like it was recorded in a different spelunking expedition.  I know "cavernous" is a really overused term in the modern death metal scene but it's pretty much right on the money here.  I know I compared it to sounding like it's billions of light years away, but at the same time it sounds so barren and earthy that it could simultaneously be coming from a dripping cave right underneath your feet.  It's very "watery" sounding, but instead of violent thrashing as you try not to drown, it sounds like you didn't realize you were underwater until you were a few miles down, the music manifesting as a few gurgling blubs that reach the surface long after you try to scream.

Now, that should be cool, but I think I opened this with a brief screed against Finndeath because Desecresy is so emblematic of my basic problem with it.  There's no doubt that it, as a general rule, takes an approach that aims to overwhelm the listener with incomprehensible atmosphere, but in doing so it sacrifices exactly what I love so much about death metal in the first place.  In aiming for such a goal, they completely eschew the raw, pugilistic spirit of the genre itself.  Death metal may be at its best and most interesting when it's completely divorced from thrash metal (Altars of Madness is a classic for a reason), but there's a particular saying about reinventing the wheel that I just can't help but think of here.  Tommi tried to out-clever himself here and removed the very fangs that are supposed to hook you in the first place.  This holistic bleakness pads the gloves of the fist that by all means should be punching me to death, essentially tying big pillows with a cartoon skull on them over Mike Tyson's hands.  These riffs have no fucking punch, is what I'm saying.  Towards Nebulae is nothing but soft edges in a washed out haze.  There was a time in history when the Extremely Online metal snobs pegged Finndeath as some sort of higher form of death metal that transcended itself into something entirely new, and yeah that's true to an extent, but they achieved this by working against their own strengths.  This obviously isn't a hard and fast rule, but Desecresy is just another band I can point to when I find myself needing to explain why this legendary scene leaves me so cold.  If distant watery solos, muddy riffs, and cacophonous percussion is your thing, then hey you might love this.  But for me, I'll give some props to "The Damned Expedition" for being pretty good, but it's with the caveat that it's because it's one of the most straightforward and simple tracks on the album.  Everything else is a weird, incomprehensible mess and it's just not for me.


RATING: 44%

Sempiternal Dusk - Cenotaph of Defectuous Creation

This shit is so boring.

The image is the whole review.

Orbstruct - Phobos Rising

Big meaty groovy death metal

This one threw me for a loop right at the start.  "Venus" opens with a quick vocal passage before the music starts, but I could've sworn I was about to be treated to a fucking massive breakdown based on those vocals.  I find myself here encountering trouble articulating what the fuck I mean by that, but I guess the vocals here just sound kinda deathcorey at times, and I realize now that I have no words to describe how that's different from regular old death metal vocals.  They sound... I dunno, more lung and less throat?  Does that make sense?  Either way, I'm not meaning this in a negative way, I think the sound of Orbstruct's debut, Phobos Rising, is fucking massive, and the vocals are just one component of that.  I can't seem to find a whole lot of info with regards to where this was recorded or who was responsible for mixing/mastering/producing the whole thing, but I give a lot of credit to this album's effectiveness to whoever was behind the knobs on this one, because this is a gargantuan wall of sound that just falls on top of the listener with the weight of an ocean. 

Beyond how simply fucking huge Phobos Rising sounds, it's equally effective in it's simplistic nature.  This is by no means a "stupid" album, as I'm so fond of referring to shallow releases, it's just single-minded and uninterested in technical complexities.  This gruesome twosome from Ukraine waste no time with jangly atmosphere or mindbending theatrics, preferring instead to just waltz into the room and headbutt everybody to death.  This is the sort of death metal that I always kinda hoped Obituary would've actually sounded like with their heavy emphasis on groove (instead of just being slow and boring for like 25 straight years).  This isn't overtly doomy like the slow sections in Autopsy or Asphyx or something, here the groovy elements are much skippier and full of vigor.  There's a very pugilistic sense of directness with these tracks.  Check out the intro of "God's Gun" or "East of You", or the fucking wicked breakdown section in "Utopian".  This is still death metal to the core, no bones about it, but many sections are presented with such a barbaric, single minded focus on one-note chug-savagery that I just can't help but feel like these guys are bloody-jawed cavemen. 

That's not to say the tropes of traditional death metal are eschewed entirely here, there are numerous sections of frantic blasting and Vader styled tremolo riffs, they just tend to shine the brightest when the reign in the tempo without losing focus on ferocious intensity.  It's at precisely this moment that I remember who Orbstruct reminds me of, and that's the Dubaite Nervecell.  While Nervecell tended to be a pretty stock and merely decent band on the whole, they had one huge standout moment on their sophomore release, Psychogenocide.  The last 45 seconds of the last song on that album were among the most underappreciated seconds of all 2011.  The outro of "Nation's Plague" was fast, simple, and heavy.  Just pure brutality in a simplified form that devastated me from the first listen and became the only reason I even remembered that fucking band eight years later.  Phobos Rising is like a full album of those 45 seconds.

The only real problem with this album is that it's kinda samey on the whole, and the only real standouts have already been mentioned.  "God's Gun" and "Venus" are excellent songs, and "East of You" isn't too far behind, but I still have trouble recalling the rest of the album.  But honestly that's not really a gamebreaker, because on the whole this is a very good album that I can definitely see myself revisiting more than a few times as the year goes on. 


RATING: 85%

Necrotombs - Embalmed with Rotten Flesh

SNORE

This is pretty much the perfect example of the okayest album ever.  Necrotombs is the solo project of Xerberus, currently the bassist of Stigmhate and the ex-bassist of several other bands you've never heard of.  His second album here, Embalmed with Rotten Flesh is perfectly serviceable and by no means bad in any way, but it's also completely unremarkable and completely not worth listening to. 

That's pretty much all there is to say about it, which is sad because that's only three sentences and two of them barely have anything to do with the music itself.  It's just that there's so little here worth commenting on.  This is orthodox death metal with no new ideas executed perfectly competently.  I can't really give a whole lot of praise to any particular aspect of it.  There are moments of interest here and there, like the heightened thrash influence of "Born from a Corpse", the back of of "Emptiness of Solitude" where the vocals break from the traditional deep death metal growls and switch to an insanely loud yell, there's the relentlessly heavy grooves of "Frozen to Be Eaten", but all of those moments are barely more interesting than the moments surrounding them and even so they're not particularly great.  If there's anything that might sum up what this album sounds like, it's that it sounds like everything and nothing at the same time.  The first time I ran through this, I got a lot of Cannibal Corpse vibes, the second time I realized I was mistaken and it was actually much more akin to Entombed, then the third I was convinced it was more early Pestilence I was hearing, then the fourth I realized all of those were wrong and it was actually Autopsy, and then et cetera forever.  This isn't because Necrotombs takes the best elements from all the best classic bands and utilizes them all in a way that's so seamless that it sounds like something else entirely.  No, this is because this album is so fucking bland and faceless that it can sound like whatever you want it to sound like depending on where your mind is at at any given time.

There's nothing to talk about here.  This is regular ass death metal with no defining features and no excitement.  The riffs are all bog-standard entry level thrashy death metal with Obituary styled stomps, the drums hit all the usual beats you'd expect for a band of this type (though they're not particularly blast heavy, though that could be because Xerberus simply isn't a drummer), the vocals have a throaty van Drunen approach, and hey this all sounds great on paper but in practice it's just wholly forgettable.  If anything, the one thing that truly stands out as different are the two instrumental tracks, which are significantly longer than the rest of the songs and contain riffs that could've easily gone on the rest of the songs without anybody noticing.  They don't feel like songs that are instrumental for any artistic reason, or like these riffs were written with that express purpose, or like these songs were finished but so unconventional that vocals just wouldn't fit anywhere.  Nah, they just sound like collections of riffs that the dude didn't know what to do with so he just hucked 'em all together with no vocal track and called it a day.  There's just no reason to listen to this, competent as it may be.


RATING: 50%

Nucleus - Entity

Whocleus?

Let's flash back to 2016 for a moment, and take a sentence out of my own review for Nucleus's debut, Sentient back when that was new.

"I don't tend to look towards a band's future all that often, but I can see them being the type of band who really pulls it together on the sophomore effort."

I uhh... wasn't exactly correct.

This is a bummer, because I want to love Nucleus.  I love that Chicago has a band that has real name recognition on a national stage, I love that these dudes are all my age and absolutely crushing it harder than I ever could (which is less impressive now that I'm creeping up on 30 but cut me some slack), but man have they proven themselves to be frustrating to me.  I thought their debut was good and showed a lot of promise, but in hindsight I think I overrated it a tad purely out of fear since I bump into these guys at shows all the time and they know who I am (well, really just Dano but hey).  Now that I'm just a total hermit who only leaves the house to buy toilet paper and fast food, I feel a bit more confident in just admitting that Entity is a disappointment.

Nucleus seems to be a rarity where their full lengths are always their weakest offerings.  The Colony and Hegemony are excellent EPs that rightfully earned them all the hype they had rolling into their debut, which wound up being pretty flawed and only really standing out during the slower, more crushing moments (the best track, "Cube", was featured on Hegemony as well), only for them to follow that up with the Fragmented Self split with Macabra which showed them absolutely honing in on their strengths and delivering three monstrously punishing tracks.  I was hoping that was a sign of things to come for Entity, since that split finally saw them sounding like their own band instead of a Demilich/Timeghoul worship act, but here we are, another full length where they leaned in extra hard on the Demilichisms and lost their identity again.

While the debut sounded like a blend of that weird Finndeath of the early 90s with Demilich and Adramelech mixed with the early definition of American technical death metal like Nocturnus, Entity seems them erring further towards the Finndeath side and again coming off as pretenders to a throne that can never be usurped.  We already have Demilich, we already have Tucker-era Morbid Angel, we already have Gorguts, we have plenty of spacey and dissonant death metal already and Nucleus isn't standing out nearly as strongly as something like Blood Incantation in the realm of modern bands doing this sort of thing.

That's not to say they or this album are bad necessarily, just kinda safe for a weird DM offshoot, if that makes sense.  Fans of this "Timelich" style are going to love this, but for me, I just wish there was more to it than by-the-numbers Timelich.  Entity is a step up in some respects from Sentient, but it's just kinda inverted.  The debut struggled to keep my attention during the fast parts but had some menacing midpaced sections that absolutely crushed my spine.  The sophomore has much better and more interesting fast moments (and far more frequently as well), but there are very few single moments that shatter my skull like in "Swarm", "Cube", or "Extirpate".  This is much more Gorguts-y on the whole as well, which might sound weird since I just said this is also more Demilich than ever before, but really those two bands mix together so well that it's only a natural combination of influences to have.  This whole album is very dissonant and chaotic, and it works for what it is, it's just not as exciting as the last album.  There are great moments here still, for sure.  The three minute mark of "Arrival" is fucking scary in how destructive and explosive it is, "Mobilization" opens on one of those pummeling Suffocation riffs that I loved so much from before, and I adore the creepy acoustic/bass-heavy intro of "Approach".  But the standouts themselves are kinda few and far between, and the album instead tends to sit on something of a plateau throughout the runtime.  And admittedly, if those midpaced moments actually are heavier than the debut, then I might not even have noticed purely for how distant and fuzzy the production is.  It certainly helps the album feel chaotic and alien, but it doesn't do any favors in the realm of actual heaviness.

I've probably made this sound worse than it actually is, and that's my own failing.  This album isn't bad, it's solid, it's just less than what I was hoping for and I can't help but let that cloud my judgment I suppose.  This is only a marginal improvement from the debut, and that's only because the part that was lacking before is improved while the part that was a standout before is now unremarkable.  So now, across the board it's a slight step up, but at the sacrifice of notable standout moments.  Simply put, it's not a very exciting release.  And that sucks.


RATING: 65%

Warforged - I: Voice

This album gave me respiratory failure

Y'know, it figures I just finished a review ranting about how Artisan Era has usurped Unique Leader and Willowtip for the Tech Death Saturation Award, and then the very next thing I tackle is a band on their label that doesn't fit the bill at all.

Warforged obviously gets bonus consideration from me purely for being lucky enough to hail from my neck of the woods, but luckily they're an example of a local band doing Chicago proud for once.  Their debut here is clearly meant to be the first part of a saga of sorts given the title, I: Voice, and I can say with certainty that I'm going to keep my ears open for any followup.  Voice is very long at 72 minutes, and it's very dense with a whole lot of shit going on, but it's all done very well and the album ebbs and flows enough for the epic length to never become truly overwhelming, try as the music itself might.  Quiet ambient keyboard/acoustic passages occasionally break up some absolutely monstrous black/death throughout the runtime, and while these guys may not be masters of infectious riffing, they excel when it comes to atmosphere.  Voice is just an endless deluge of confusion and misery, and the disorienting, angular wonkiness of the music keeps the listener on their toes. 

The melodic techiness that their label specializes in is certainly prominent in parts (check the midpoint of "Beneath the Forest Floor") but it's not really their forte.  No, like I said their true strength lies in overwhelmingly crushing atmosphere, and special mention has to go to Adrian Perez's vocal performance.  This guy is absolutely fucking venomous and delivers one of the most menacing and caustic vocal performances I've heard all year.  Seriously this guy's shriek is out of this world, and I'm willing to peg him as the musical highlight.  With how the music cycles in and out of quiet and loud, he shines the brightest in both segments since he also handles the keyboards and piano when they invariably show up during the quiet passages.  Nobody in the band stands out as a slouch though, but the rest of the guys are merely serviceable towards the end goal ravenous devastation instead of being the driving force like the vocals.  Musically this hits many of the same notes as some of the more atmospheric tech death bands like Fallujah or later era The Faceless, or maybe something a bit more overtly black metal (those vocals I love so much tend to sit in a mid/high register instead of the traditional deep death metal growl, though he's capable of those as well) like Enfold Darkness.  Regardless, it's massive sounding and absolutely punishing.

I don't have many bad things to say about this, only nitpicks.  Like the riffs themselves aren't super engaging and tend to just chug really fast or noodle around the middle of the fretboard, but when coupled with the destructively complex percussion and harrowing vocals it all blends together very well into a monumental atmospheric statement.  And I guess there aren't any true standout tracks but this is clearly meant to be an album experience so it doesn't really matter.  Even my usual preference for short albums takes a backseat here since they pace themselves throughout the gargantuan runtime extremely well.  The whole thing is a knockout, and there isn't much about it I would change. 


RATING: 90%

Inanimate Existence - Clockwork

Shoulda been a dreg drainer

The Artisan Era seems to have swiftly taken over as the label du jour for frantic and noodly tech death.  Ten years ago when the genre exploded after seemingly everybody decided at once that Necrophagist was the best band ever and we all need to sound like them right now, you could guess with like 99% accuracy that any given tech death album was going to be released on Unique Leader or Willowtip.  Now that I've been getting back into the style after many years of burnout, I can't help but notice that both labels seem to have begun focusing on brutality more than tech outright.  To help fill the void of this particular niche that once saturated the death metal scene to a near toxic degree, Artisan Era seems to have been the one to have taken the torch, currently championing some of the hottest noodlecore bands in the market right now (both good and bad) with Inferi, Augury, Virulent Depravity, Equipoise, The Odious Construct, and many others, including our subject today (a band poached from Unique Leader, oddly enough), Inanimate Existence.

These California boys apparently have a pretty impressive career behind them already, one that I'm completely unfamiliar with since they started right around the time I grew bored of their style, so my first impression of them is actually their fifth offering, Clockwork.  While it's a good record, it does suffer from being somewhat faceless.  These eight songs are all insane, full speed ahead monsoons of blasts and riffage with a fat injection of obscene amounts of melody, but they fall into the common trap of failing to present many lasting hooks and memorable songs.  Instead we just get forty unremarkable minutes of decent melodic tech death that fly by inoffensively enough.  I like the specific niche within the scene that they occupy, sounding very similar to Decrepit Birth or Gorod with how much overt melody they cram into all of these songs, but they don't stack up to those titans by any means.  Their main hook is the soaring, Mithras-styled lead guitar lines that pretty much never stop, with occasional jazzy breaks here and there but they're all short and unobtrusive.  And hey man, that's a good hook, Decrepit Birth showed out how it can be a god damned artform, but despite their bountiful career at this point, it doesn't seem like Inanimate Existence has quite mastered it.

Unfortunately that's really about all there is to say about this.  There isn't a whole lot of substance beyond "decent tech death" and that's a shame.  Apparently the lyrics are all centered around the philosophical idea of absurdism, which I think is endlessly fascinating and Albert Camus is one of my favorite thinkers of the last century, but unfortunately simply due to the nature of the music here you'd have no way of actually knowing that without looking at the lyrics separately.  So it's a cool idea that's hidden entirely by the bland but well performed blastery and weedlywees.  I think the closest thing to a standout track here is something like "Ocean" or "Apophenia", but honestly it's hard to tell because everything sounds pretty much the same.  Like I said, it's very faceless and inoffensive production-line tech death with little else going for it.  Inanimate Existence is a solid band and Clockwork is a solid album but that's really all there is to it, nothing beyond that.


RATING: 69%

Ayakasi Kagura - Zankyo

MY SKULL HURTS

Hey!  Have you been listening to me bellow for five-plus years now about how fucking awesome Gotsu Totsu Kotsu is?  You should, because it seems like they've been steadily growing in popularity ever since I first heard them in 2013 with the stellar Legend of Shadow.  They're pure excess in the most extreme form, with tumbling slap bass and whirlwind riffs at light speed, they're one of the most magnanimous and iconoclastic metal bands of the modern era, completely shattering the mold of what death metal is capable of without treading a path that dozens of other bands are doing at the same time.  Fuck atmosphere and dissonance, they just play three riffs at the same time and found apparently the only way to have a noodly low end that complements the frantic brutality instead of needlessly showboating with constant soloing.

But hey, now that they're popular enough to finally have their three latest albums on Spotify, are you yearning for something much less popular that hits the same basic idea of "dizzying death metal brutality with a distinctly Japanese flair for showmanship"?  Well look no further than Ayakasi Kagura, a one-man wrecking crew from Ibaraki.

Obviously Ayakasi Kagura reminds me a lot of GTK, but I should emphasize that they remind me of GTK's more "normal" segments.  There aren't any mystifyingly dazzling instrumental moments here, instead it's like an entire album of the opening of "Gokumon" instead of the bridge of "Nadegiri".  That still means this is really good, but it's a bit less adventurous in its brutality.  What Zankyo focuses on more than anything is pure, unrelenting speed.  There are more churning moments here and there, and "Kurotsuka" has a positively doomy riff in the bridge, but every moment is comparatively short lived and ultimately gives way to headspinning blasting and hyperspeed tremolo riffing. That's really the album's greatest strength, because as a fan of warpspeed insanity, this hits all the right notes.  It's not particularly techy either, which isn't necessarily a good or bad thing in itself, but I can't help but admit that I have a soft spot for death metal that rips along at this speed without ever truly losing the base simplicity that makes death metal so morbid and punishing in the first place.  It's like a Deicide album on the wrong table speed, and that's just fucking rad.

Despite that, this is still a decidedly modern album.  There are a few scattered breakdowns here and there that do a lot to help keep the experience from being too one-note.  The man behind the band (whose name I've never seen transliterated so I'm going to just call him Waifu Slayer) is also really fond of Mithras/Sarpanitum styled screaming lead guitar.  Soaring above the manic riffage and absolutely hog wild percussion at any given moment will be these squealing spacey leads, that lend a ton of character to the album.  The vocals are also much deeper than regular old death metal, taking more cues from the BDM scene than anything else, and they're fucking monstrous.

Zankyo isn't a total knockout though, unfortunately.  The two most obvious problems are the length and the production.  52 minutes isn't too long for a metal album in a vacuum, but for this particular style it just gets to be completely overwhelming.  We didn't need fifteen tracks of such maddening brutality, everything starts to blur together before long and as a result I can't help but lose interest after a handful of tracks nearly every time, no matter how good they are.  This is an album best listened to on shuffle simply so you can hear some new tracks in each session before losing interest.  Waifu Slayer could have easily cut five or six tracks off of this and put it closer to 35 minutes for a much more concise and focused experience.  The production is a bit of a mess too.  It's a brutal wall of sound and it works for what the music is, but the levels seem to be uneven and as a result most of the sound is totally dominated by drums and vocals, especially during the (very, very frequent) blasting sections.  The riffs here are all excellent but they're often completely buried under an avalanche of frantic percussion. 

So on the whole, Zankyo is definitely worth checking out for any fan of limitless brutality, and I'm eternally thankful for Waifu Slayer bringing the project back after a short hiatus and getting this album out on Stillbirth Records so I can actually fucking hear it here in the States, but it is undeniably a flawed gem.  Take it in short bursts, otherwise your brain is just gonna fuckin' melt.


RATING: 78%

Sxuperion - Endless Spiritual Embodiment

Sxtiousie and the Blandcheese

Sxuperion apparently has a pretty solid body of work behind him already, but this fourth full length, Endless Spiritual Embodiment is my first brush with the sort-of-eponymously-named project.  I actually know a tiny bit of the guy's work, as I've heard him create some damn solid stuff drumming for Valdur a year or two ago, but Sxuperion here is his baby, where he handles every instrument, every lyric, every note, even the label it's released on.  So yeah there's no doubt that Sxuperion is a vanity project, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a very good one.

One of my low-key favorite bands that I rarely ever talk about is Blasphemy, and I hear a lot of those guys here.  So it goes without saying that this is some form of black/death metal, though it doesn't quite tap the same war metal vein of the aforementioned influence.  Instead, this leans heavily on a form of meaningless chaos, and I mean "meaningless" in the sense of a nihilist philosophy where the world is an uncaring cosmic void of pointless misery.  Endless Spiritual Embodiment is therefore dripping with malice and misanthropy, tumbling wildly through malevolent corridors bleeding black blood.  It's hard to tell exactly which side of the black/death dichotomy Sxuperion favors, because a good case could be made for both.  "Endless Embodiment" is based on a very spacey black metal feel with furious death metal riffage, while "Sacred Chamber of the Enlightenment" strikes with destructive European death metal morbidity atop a bleak black metal atmosphere.  Think of something like a deeper and meatier Archgoat or a colder and faster Blood Incantation.  Sxuperion expertly straddles the line and in turn opens a portal to a realm that, while well tread, is endless in its capacity for extremity.

The vocals are deep and bestial, the riffs are menacing and snarling, the atmosphere is cold and unfeeling, and what ties it all together is ironically a sense that nothing works.  Nearly every song includes a quiet interlude where almost nothing exists but dead air, allowing you to contemplate the absurdity of existence on your own before the tumbling cacophony returns to give you the answer.  The album smoothly swells between these cold voids of contemplative nonexistence and explosions of violent unmusical racket, and I think the album's true strength is that it's never really disorienting despite the chaotic din of cosmic torment.  Life is a hellish kaleidoscope of meaningless absurdity that takes place in a world that doesn't care about you and Sxuperion delivers the soundtrack for this bitter nonexistence.


RATING: 88%