Avariel - Avariel

Avariel - Avariel 

What's the Rush?

In this prematurely released demo from 2009, there is no doubt that the hamstrung vocals are the strongest element. Following the usual gothic/symphonic metal formula, Avariel saunters forward with Shannon Kelly’s singing, embellished with guitars and synthesizers. Avariel is strongest and most promising during the moments where the band sticks to the staples of their genre. There, the songs have a sense of cadence with fairly timed build-ups and crescendos that display a more than competent structure. But each time the band deviates from this and steers more toward ballad or poppy territory, the songwriting becomes stagnant and flat. More problematic is how the songwriting can not compensate for how weak each instrument sounds.

Worst of all are the drums, tinny programmed drums are not exactly rare in metal demos. While the drum lines are programmed with serviceable variation here, the actual samples are strikingly and distractingly poor. Were they were recorded from a cheap keyboard that had tears in the speakers and water damage? Unlikely, but the result is the same and even immediately apparent due to “Bleed” starting off with the very worst of it. The demo will even come across as cheap and unfinished for listeners who have been inured to distracting drum samples because of the shoddy synths. This is bad news for a symphonic metal band; attempting to channel the richness of a symphony with a few simple synth pads is difficult. The task becomes impossible when those synth pads also sound inferior, melodramatic, and cheesy. “Tunnel’s Light” in particular showcases an exaggerated synth motif, a slurry of notes so devoid of character that it both bookends the song and serves as a transition from its climax. Adding bland digital guitar and bass tones on top of this heavy handed aspect of the band also fails to salvage the demo.

Unreasonable and disappointing decisions kill the hydra’s last head - vocals. Avariel’s misuse of the vocals is a mix between deliberate decisions and an apparent rush to release a demo. Deliberate vocal sabotage occurs mostly on “Tunnel’s Light” featuring ridiculous effects that adulterate the vocals: a 1970’s telephone sound-quality effect and an obnoxious tremolo effect. This is really irritating and reeks of poppy pandering, but unfortunately isn’t the only way that Shannon Kelly’s vocals are misused. While clearly capable of singing in each song’s range, she does so inconsistently even within individual songs. She wavers between a raw and strained performance to effortlessly hitting higher notes, giving off the impression that the recordings were too rushed to allow for better takes.

While there is some promise and talent in the songwriting and vocals, the demo falters through its poor instrument quality and boring poppy proclivities. Clocking in at around 15 minutes, the decision to have a ballad for the second song is also puzzling and disappointing. Although only a demo, Avariel should have recorded this after they had more professional sounds and given more time for Shannon Kelly to consistently sing the vocal lines.


Link: http://www.metal-archives.com/band/view/id/127862

Fleurety - Department Of Apocolaptic Affairs

                                                Fleurety - Department of Apocalyptic Affairs
                                                             Incoherent Irritation

Fleurety’s “Department of Apocalyptic Affairs” is unusual. Despite how unbelievably incoherent it is, nearly every turn in the music manages to be irritating. For the sake of context, this Norwegian duo is perhaps best known for either their first full length and highly regarded black metal album “Min Tid Skal Komme” or from the fact that Alexander Nordgaren stopped singing after damaging his voice due to impossibly high pitched whistle-register vocals on the band’s earlier releases. Here, Fleurety diverged from their past and took a hard left into experimental territory while simultaneously plummeting in quality. Experimentation can be refreshing, no one likes stale music that merely reiterates what has been done in the past. “Department of Apocalyptic Affairs,” however, shows how novelty alone is painfully insufficient to create an album. Indeed, novelty is the only real driving force here, and little attention was given to more important considerations like vision, structure, or melody. Curve after random curve yields new musical ideas, directions, and disappointments. This failure is haphazard and thoughtless eclecticism.

Opening up with “Exterminators” is helpful for understanding the problems. Within the first two minutes you can get a strong sense of most of the album’s major deficiencies. We are introduced with a silly circus melody joined with wacky flanger guitar and a walking bass that ambles its way into a third unrelated direction. This third direction later turns out to be a genre change. Jazzy, intimate, and silly female scatting vocals abruptly make the bass more comprehensible, but without remedying the impression that we have started a new song. Naturally, some dissonant guitar chords then chime in, only to be interrupted by a nonsense piano diddle. This is in turn followed by a boring guitar riff that comes across as something between an echo and interminable repetition. The entire album often keeps going on like these first two minutes do, failing to sustain any kind of atmosphere or even establish a mood other than disorganization and silliness. Even the component parts that make up the songs are grating because of how they fail to mesh together. Sure, it isn’t completely awful. The bass lines are often interesting and more vivacious than what is normally expected in metal. Still, everything feels entirely out of place and even individual components that may have some merit become grating when carelessly thrown together.

The primary style and source of novelty is the amalgamation of loungey elevator jazz and black metal somewhat in the vein of experimental releases from the same era such as Mayhem’s “Grand Declaration of War” and Dødheimsgard’s “666 International.” When listening to it though, one would think there were also half a dozen other genres involved at all times because of how indelicately these two major themes are blended. Abrupt and pointless changes in music sections sound like the band made two separate albums in different genres, cut them into chunks, and then shuffled together like a deck of cards. The Mayhem comparison provides a nice contrast even for those unfamiliar with “Grand Declaration of War.” “Shotgun Blast” features Maniac on vocals and presenting the lyrics in a harangue-the-listener style as he also used on that album, but as the rest of the music meanders around with dance pad sounds it just feels like random nonsense. Next consider how Dødheimsgard’s more industrial approach also used similar dance percussion elements with driving bass lines to create an interesting mood, which we never hear with this despite the similar parts. Fleurety fails to match their contemporaries in quality because their quest for a more experimental and eclectic approach sacrificed too much of their central metal roots. This does not mean that the album is flawed because it sounds too much like dance music or jazz. Instead, the problem rests with how it tries to be a metal album without the metal, and this leaves the band with no organizing principle or direction. A particularly glaring example of this lack of direction is how with only 8 tracks the duo felt it necessary to include two very similar versions of the song “Face In A Fever” with each member having their own edition. Fleurety’s unwillingness to even settle on one version of the song means you end up listening to it twice, and this is just another instance how the failure to synthesize ideas leads to ruin.

When an album simply fails to come together, it is unfortunate and can result in a failure. This goes much further, its exhausting and obnoxious. More prominent than the obnoxious elements I mentioned earlier are the vacuous vocal decisions that rapidly drop the quality from incoherent to awful. After singling out Maniac’s beatnik poetry reading on “Shotgun Blast” it is hard to pick from the numerous examples what might be next most irritating item on the list, but the cartoon super-villain vocals at the end of “Facets 2.0” are nearly as awful. Again, the surprising part of this is how with so many vocals styles why none of them manage to be anything but aggravating. Even the relatively inoffensive female vocals on “Facets 2.0” sound strained, thin, and wholly inferior to the band’s “Last-Minute Lies” EP version of the same song. The album’s incoherence also makes it naturally exhausting but this is compounded by bad pacing decisions such as having the sixth and seventh tracks so mild and one dimensional (yet still incoherent) that they create the sensation that the album is coming to a close. Not so. Instead, after about 14 minutes of creating that feeling, the album actually ends with a song whose gauche saxophone intrusions had worn out their welcome when the song was the second track.

“Department of Apocalyptic Affairs” does some new and unusual things for a metal album but fails to ever be interesting or organize these various ideas together. Combine this with how irritating so much of the album is and you get something that is far worse than a run-of-the-mill failure.

Jute Gyte - Discontinuities

Jute Gyte - Discontinuities

Sui generis

The wildly outlandish Jute Gyte is an unquestionably unique musical project. With the occasional tremolo picked riffs and glass shards in the throat vocals, it is obvious that Jute Gyte has taken some cues from black metal. However, outside of these superficial aspects of “Discontinuities” there is no sense in trying to think of the album in terms of existing metal sub-genres. It is best to think of the project as extremely experimental. Jute Gyte takes melodies that are so unusual that they almost sound like accidents and layers them with seamless and oddly natural asymmetry. Think of how a flounder twists and flattens as it ages. The end result of Jute Gyte’s twisting asymmetry is alienating yet spectacular, while “Discontinuities” has its flaws, the album clearly illustrates how Jute Gyte is absolutely unforgettable.

Experimentation permeates every moment of “Discontinuities” in ways that are readily apparent yet deep seated. Dissonant waves of jangling jump out one after another, starkly assuring the listener that the full yet unfamiliar sounds will persist, instead of being used to contrast or highlight soothing melodies. Even the calmer and relatively sedate sections of music are still unsettling and weird. This may not sound like anything new on paper, but the use of a 24-tone guitar means that the album uses notes that typically are not used in Western music. To oversimplify, normally on a guitar you can play 12 different notes but this album uses a guitar that allows for 24.

Ultimately, this is just another tool that Jute Gyte uses to create uncomfortable soundscapes. Instead of making everything sound out of tune, the dizzying flurries of notes are jarring, but deliberate. This approach keeps the experimentation from sounding either haphazard or manufactured, and with such an important change to the guitar this success is vital. As past albums have shown, Jute Gyte does not need a 24-tone guitar to make off-kilter music. At its heart, “Discontinuities” is unusual because the overall approach to composition and melody immerse the listener into an alien world. So while Jute Gyte utilizes many tools like a 24-tone guitar or polyrhythms, which do influence the composition, the central focus is still on the music rather than how it was put together.

Despite the overwhelmingly dissonant nature of the music, the mood isn’t nearly as abrasive as one would expect. Outside of the shrieking violence in the vocals, there is a peculiar and even paradoxical calmness in the tone that supersedes the frenzied parts that make up the album. Most of the time this feels like a stalwart sense of direction that guides the notes along the way through all of the chaos and is perfected at the end of “The Haunting Sense...” This is also a key part of how enveloping waves of clashing notes can be. Infrequently however, this quasi-calmness sounds like the cold emotionless side effect of contrived musical ideas. Fortunately, “Discontinuities” mostly maintains a strong direction through the very same technique that helps create some of this paradox of calm chaos. This technique is the careful layering of melodies on top of one another to bury you deep in dissonance.

The typical path in music is to have many parts acting mostly together, as a flock of birds to create a whole, Jute Gyte instead favors more independent parts that coalesce to create a coherent whole. As a key part of this, melodies do not clearly stop and start together. Picture how the molecules of air inside of a jar are always moving around, yet that air never separates into chunks of its component elements. This speaks to the calmness in Jute Gyte’s chaos, as one melody drifts off into bizarre territory another melody is still pulsing or repeating. Each part is moving but the mix as a whole remains consistent. Look to how the persistent drums, plodding rhythm, and bass smooth out the angular melodies in “Supreme Fictions....” and “Acedia.” This is how there is such a sense of both change and stability and it makes the alienation fantastically alluring by forging its own sense of logic and structure.

Fleshed out and detailed with synths and a warm sinuous bass, “Discontinuities” also relies on them to round out the abrasive vocals and angular approach to the guitar and drums. The synthesizer in particular immediately drapes other instruments in its emotional color as when the eerie and light chords of “The Failure of Transmutation” sneak into the mix. Flourishes like this serve to keep the rough and jangling parts within the realm of the unsettling rather than creating more of a harsh atmosphere. Contrary to this, the drums feel bare and mathematical, yet follow the overall emotional intensity of the music enough to make their dryness fade away as an issue. 

While the large majority of the focus is on the composition rather than underlying technique, there are times where the album fails on this point. Sometimes the album is overbearingly alienating when the sense of calmness stops being unsettling and starts getting tiresome. Undue repetition is the culprit here, but it is a repetition of patterns rather than particular riffs or notes. The more structural example of this is in “Romanticism Is Ultimately Fatal” where the intro’s predictably declining melody repeats and then later gives way to a chugging riff that similarly rises without going anywhere. Sounding like the musical equivalent of a staircase drawn by M. C. Escher, these parts and the title track “Discontinuities” unfortunately come across more like sketches practicing with a new tool (a 24-tone guitar) than complete pictures. Still, both songs are strong. “Romanticism....” has perhaps the most eerie melody of the album, which is beautifully reinforced by electronic flittering. The minimal instrumentation on “Discontinuities” serves as useful break from the chaotic music, even if it is far too long and repetitive. There, the quiet screaming noises that bookend the song are also an excellent and subtle detail.

With this radical level of experimentation, the degree to which the album feels natural rather than manufactured is impressive. Perhaps it is unsurprising then that Jute Gyte is a one man band, the work of Adam Kalmbach whose experimental tendencies have gone untempered by the compromises that often happen with collaborations. “Discontinuities” is daunting because of its strangeness, its hour long length, and a certain kind of majesty that isn’t immediately obvious or instantly rewarding. Still, the album has lasting power far beyond whatever novelty it provides. Although supremely strange, it is more importantly a great album because of how the immersive layering makes such an alienating experience one that is absolutely worth repeating.

Jute Gyte's expansive discography is available to download (and as far as I know every release is free) or purchase a physical copy of here: http://jutegyte.bandcamp.com/

Metal Archives Page: http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Jute_Gyte/3540308568

Eric Pellegrini - Volume I

Eric Pellegrini - Volume I

A Guitar Player’s Backing Track

What happens when you have music that is serviceable while simultaneously uninspired? If “Volume I” is any indication, then the result is surprisingly disappointing.

“Volume I” suffers primarily because Eric Pellegrini's songwriting is almost solely guitar oriented. However, this album is not a vanity piece. Rather, it is a genuine effort at balanced melodic death metal which fails to manifest itself as such because Pellegrini develops songs only through the instrument with which he is most familiar, the guitar. As metal is generally very guitar oriented, this makes for an inoffensive album, but one that is substantially flawed and derivative. While the drums, vocals, bass, and even rhythm guitar all sound passable; they do very little for the music other than serve as an enervated accompaniment.

This instruments-as-background-sounds problem exists even on the final outro, where one would expect the sense of direction on the album to be at its height. Instead, “The World is A Stage” features fine albeit programmed drums, acting as a mere accompaniment. It feels like there is no person behind the drums, no emotion even. We have various beats and fills that are there just without purpose other than making it sound finished. Instead of being slightly off in this respect and raising the question of whether a real drummer would do this, it screams loudly that no drummer would do this. “Volume I” is like this for much of its duration, and it isn't limited to the drumming. While nothing in the instrumentation crosses over into the realm of sounding overly offensive or bad in of itself, a real harm is still done because of how mechanical, routine, and predictable this backing-track style makes the album.

The exception is of course the guitar work and it is here that the album is at its strongest. Still, Pellegrini adheres conservatively to the scènes à faire of melodic death metal. Some chugged riffs, some harmonizing, some melodic tremolo riffing. Without being a backdrop like other aspects of the music, the guitars are still very predictable and routine with only rare signs of personal flair. Consequently, the album’s zenith is still a point far from excellence, which is important to consider because of how lifeless the remainder of the instruments are.

In the solos, you can hear this all quite clearly, they are unimaginative yet competently played. The first half of the solo on “Discrepancy” isn’t far off from a guitar player practicing scales over a metronome. Some arpeggios also come in, as expected, but with a tinge of neoclassical influence showing some of that personal flair. This is a sign that Pellegrini is creatively trapped in the confines of melodic death metal. For example, the best and most creative bit of the album is the clean section in “Discrepancy” where we get nice neoclassical melodic layering. An earlier example is in “The Black Feathered Vixen” with a similarly influenced clean section that is a bit sloppy, but still one of the album’s high points.

While competent in the vocal department tonally, Pellegrini's delivery fails for feeling emotionally blank and constrained by the guitar melodies. The whispered style on “Ringmaster” and various flirtations with double tracking fail to improve this problem. The raspy style of vocals are very pedestrian for this kind of death metal, and it appears that Pellegrini can effortlessly maintain that sound. Unfortunately it sounds like he phoned it in. Moreover, the fact that the vocals are more intelligible than in most death metal is an enormous disservice here because it draws attention to the incessantly exasperating lyrics. To understate the problem, the lyrics are the weakest element on this album. It absolutely detracts from the music when you hear lines like: “I refuse to lie, I will keep my wits about me” “I fucking hate, you ripped my heart apart” and “I, want you back, in my life, come to me, mi amore.”

In essence, “Volume I” serves more as backing sounds for Pellegrini to play guitar over than as something meant to be listened to as an album. This would have been fine, were it not for the problem that the backing music supports some really generic guitar work.

Links:
Bandcamp - http://ericpellegrini.bandcamp.com/
Metal Archives - http://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Eric_Pellegrini/3540330570 
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/EricPHeavyMetal?sk=app_2405167945

Local Band Review (New Hampshire): Black Norse - Real Mud Fake Blood

Black Norse - Real Mud Fake Blood

 In Need of Less Mud and More Blood

Muddy, messy, and mushy. With cover art showing peeling paint and women soiled (with what I think we may fairly assume is real mud and fake blood) a little dirt should be expected from this stoner doom band. And while I appreciate raw impassioned music as much as the next metal fan, Black Norse’s sloppiness here mucks up their music. The sound is so messy it is like the guitar player has down tuned a lot without using a heavier string gauge (this makes the strings really loose and easy to accidentally bend out of tune). A more pressing problem though is the way the songs are structured and how they come across.

Let me explain via anecdote. As I child I remember seeing a new school building that was constructed out of modular buildings. Each classroom had been constructed elsewhere as nothing more than a big rectangle with a finished interior and they were then all brought to one location and plopped down together and later deemed a school. Unfortunately, Black Norse’s approach comes off as if they have adopted the same philosophy in constructing their songs. Each riff is a suitable rectangle, not awful but nothing special, and the riffs are structured with the same mishmash between form a function. In other words the band has riffs but can not string more than three of them together to make a song. Part of this is how the riffs flow from one another, but the lack of an effective bass section is equally responsible. Bass lines connect rhythm and melody while also providing a backdrop for melodic change. To hear both problems, listen to “The Orc” from 1:30 to 2:00 - it builds up tension and the ascends to nothing and then listen to the lead riff parts where there is no backing bass melody. It ends up sounding choppy and aimless.

Black Norse still have some things going for them. The overall vibe is kind of cool even if it continually stops to move onto the next idea as if “Real Mud Fake Blood” was a jam session. The other highlight is that the vocals have a really nice timbre although the overarching composition problems are also evident in the vocal lines. The vocal style is what you would expect in stoner metal, echoey and chorus laden, and here the vocalist has a good voice for this. See for the first half of “High Elf” for example. Everything else drops away momentarily as we get to hear a few lyrics, neat.

The riffs themselves are really forgettable low chord strumming interspersed with rockingly trite guitar licks. On “Festival of Sin” you can hear that kind of Cathedral harmonizing that gives off that not-very-heavy but satisfactory stoner doom vibe. In the same song you can hear one frustratingly frequent motif, a heavy part followed by faster single 12th note triplets that the guitar player can barely manage to play (and faster than the drummer can do anything interesting with.) These sloppy triplets also happen at the end of “The Gallop” and the train wreck of the solo on “The Phoenix” which really breaks up that song’s pacing.

On a related note, other solos on the album are particularly illustrative of the band’s weaknesses. First, the guitar solo on Feast is really uninspiring, it comes way out of left field and is oddly dropped into the song. It also barely breaks through the bass in audibility because of the mixing and how the band chose not to use any particularly high notes. It comes off like the guitarist is most just meandering through a pentatonic scale and never really takes the melody anywhere. The end of “High Elf” has a similarly out of place series of solo flourishes, the last of which has a cringe worthy off note. A little feedback and the sounds of sliding and scraping can be great for creating a certain feel but Black Norse just goes too far with the sloppiness.

However, a stronger track is “Angel Women” but even there the band uses long rests to hide a jagged riff transition. Doing this breaks up the all ready short song on a 27 minute album and the band does the same thing with a rest on “High Elf” - building schools out of rectangles with riffs that do not follow one another.

Underlying these guitar riffs is drumming which is similarly boring and emasculated. I feel like the same 16th note fill is totally overused, but more problematic is how monophonic everything sounds. Bass, drum, guitar, vocals - they all fall on top of one another instead of adopting their own niches in the musical ecosystem. Examples of this happening are after the solo in “The Gallop,” how the vocals follow the guitar melody in the closing track, and how every other accented backbeat the guitar plays in the main riff on “The Phoenix” needs a snare hit. The instruments lack a distinctive identity.

“Real Mud Fake Blood” ends up sounding like a jam session. A forgettable one. My understanding is this was done by two people - if so, it may serve the band well to get new blood to help each instrument become more independent while forcing compromises to create a coherent whole for the band’s sound.

Have a listen for yourself - a digital version of this album is available for purchase and for listening at: http://blacknorse.bandcamp.com/album/real-mud-fake-blood

If you like the music, be sure to follow the band’s facebook page as they have live shows and a new album in the works: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-Norse/160079360686298

Local Band Review (New Hampshire): Eerie - Amplifier theosophy

Eerie - Amplifier theosophy 

(I wrote about Eerie's live show earlier.)

In what is likely best classified as falling under the drone-laden side of doom metal, this pleasant demo is emotionally pensive with a twinge of remorse, rather than the solemn and mournful tone one might expect from music in this sub-genre. Indeed, Eerie’s “Amplifier theosophy,” while entirely without vocals, is quite a reflective piece of music. As each note rings out it makes you feel like you are at home remembering things that you wished had never happened. Although rather slow and drone influenced, it is still interesting enough to listen to in its own right because it never degrades into the realm of background noise. Also, despite having drone influences, the band wisely refrained from down-tuning guitars until they sound like churning stomachs.

“Amplifier theosophy” is a pleasant and relaxing listening experience primarily because the band conveys the negative themes discreetly - mostly through emptiness in the composition. This allows the for the intuitive composition and awesome guitar tone to shine through, take over, and sooth the listener. This guitar tone is wonderful throughout the entire demo. Rich harmonic undertones serve to heighten the relaxing feeling, and with the word “Amplifier” as part of the demo’s title such a high-quality timbre is not at all surprising. Here, chords almost glimmer, which is important because the riffs themselves are not always particularly memorable and having each moment sound so good helps make up for the fact that there melody does not develop very far. 

This is what I mean by intuitive composition, i.e. the melodies are essentially arpeggios of the underlying chords or arpeggiated chords interspersed with single note quasi-solo leads (in a slow way). Nothing on this demo is unexpected and it all sounds like it strictly sticks to a single key signature. Because of this, if the band did not do so well at creating a relaxing mood the music would end up sounding really hackneyed. Instead, the almost obvious melodies create that homey feeling without coming off as boring, but it comes close. It cuts both ways because without anything melodically jarring or abrasive you can just sit back and listen. Additionally, some riffs sound very rock influenced and the whole demo kind of melds together as one song.

The most obvious comparison I can think of is to Earth's “The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull” yet Eerie ends up sounding noticeably darker and heavier. Although musically soothing, there is a delicate sense of weakness/remorse in the music. For a exemplary example, listen to how at the start of “And Graciously...” that full enveloping sound momentarily peels away for the short part of the riff with the quick triplets. It shows the band using relatively empty sections to create a darker mood. These darker feelings are amplified by how sparse the drumming can be throughout the demo (e.g. transitions during “And Graciously...” and the first couple minutes of “Both in”). When Eerie decides not to have chords ringing out, the sparse drum work makes the music quite minimalistic. Considering that there are no vocals, it is surprising that the demo does not sound sparser but Eerie effectively uses relative emptiness as a compositional tool.

Despite the weaknesses, the demo is still good. Consistently full and engendering an enveloping feeling without having a single grating or unpleasant moment, Eerie is a band worth paying attention to.

- Eerie now has a full-length out and the band has instructed people to message them through their Facebook about it. 

- Ordering information for the demo can be found here: http://opalsoundstudio.com/about.
- You can listen to Eerie here: Eerie's Reverb Nation page.

Local Band Review (Massachusetts): Ehnahre - The Man Closing Up

 Ehnahre - The Man Closing Up

Waves and Mesas.

With Ehnahre’s “The Man Closing Up,” the traditional role of melody in metal is thrown out the window. This is true even comparing them to more experimental death metal bands. Instead of focusing on melody, the band crafts songs by varying the degree of musical intensity. This rejection of melody is accomplished through the use of combinatorial 12-tone technique which allows the band to create atonal music. To perhaps oversimplify, 12-tone techniques are a way to make sure that music is not in any particular key, i.e. no one note is emphasized. This approach results in a sound which many people may find melodically disorienting. But, does this sound have any value or is it just an academic exercise?

Well, “The Man Closing Up” ends up as a good but not great album. Yes, there are riffs in the sense that certain atonal melodies are repeated. However, the band’s alternations between fast, slow, soft, and quiet are the heart of the album’s compositional approach. Variations serve to replace the structural role typically played by melody. Unfortunately these variations are often too radical yet infrequent. Their inconsistent use erodes away the primary pillar of the album’s form. In short, Ehnahre are excellent when they subtlety alternate between low and high waves of intensity and range from good to boring when they have radical mesa-like changes and flat sections without changes. To illustrate this concretely it is helpful to compare Part II with much of the rest of the album.

At about 1:20 into Part II the band transitions from mid paced dissonant chords with guttural vocals to longer drawn out notes. These sections of long notes are interrupted with a motif from earlier in the song until the interruption becomes the norm and harsher vocals replace the earlier gutturals. Although chaotic and jarring in each part, the song as a whole has an unrelenting flow because of these transitions. The speed and intensity of Part II rises and falls like a series of waves with ever increasing peaks. So while the intensity is changing from soft to loud to create much of the songs structure, that same intensity is also rising. This build up leads to a remarkable point in the album - guitars tremolo picking a single note. Just as this melodic stripping and high speed picking enters we are introduced to clean vocals. As a coda, the band returns to earlier motifs in the song and ultimately closes with a solo vocal phrase. Brilliant.

This walk through of what happens in the song should illustrate that as new elements are introduced, they are peppered into the song. Oftentimes this occurs as other instruments remain comparatively consistent, such as guitars covering for dramatic changes in the drumming. This is in stark contrast to how at many points in the album the structural transitions are more radical.

Picture courtesy of www.namastesouthafrica.com

Where Part II can be visualized as waves, much of the rest of the album is more like a flat desert spotted with a handful of mesas. To abandon metaphor in favor of definite examples, look at the cacophonous start of Part III. The first two minutes of the song are vicious and unrelenting but in a nearly uniform fashion. It ends up almost as a wash. Then when everything drastically stops we have nearly uniform low intensity. Much of the album follows this pattern, e.g. another “mesa” occurs about 2/3 of the way through Part IV. 

While these flatter parts with drastic cliffs are often still quite good, many of the quieter and slower bits can grow quit boring. Rumbling bass, random pick scraping, and weird noises all create a huge amount of tension and the sensation that the band is about to delve into another onslaught of sound. It creates an effect similar to that in horror movies: quiet high frequencies are used to build anticipation right before some loud crashing noise surprises you (a falling broom), only to have some other jarringly loud noise scare you again (the second time its the monster.) Take for example Part IV. At about 8:15 you hear a guitar strum so soft, weak, and alone that you almost feel bad for it. You hear it again. Once more. Then suddenly it jumps back loud as hell as an introduction to the song’s heavy part. However, the first 8 or so minutes of the song can be fairly boring just as boring as when the monster is not around in a bad horror movie. Moreover the introduction itself is really drastic despite this use of musical foreshadowing.

Some things in this unusual album somehow manage to stand out as unusual. With the overwhelming weirdness of the album, the vocals are remarkable in their conservatism. Although the rasps and growls are a fundamental part of how the band controls their intensity, the vocals are pretty standard for metal. While this foil serves an appreciated balancing function against the work’s overall weirdness, it may go a bit too far to the point where more straightforward vocals end up out of place. Additionally, the closing female vocals are eerie, but I can not at all see why they are there. It feels like a reversal, the band punted on their concept in lieu of something sounding more traditionally like an ending.

“The Man Closing Up” creates a mood through alternating between crushingly heavy and fast sections and slower quieter bits. This mood is thoroughly odd and creates a sensation of restlessness as the ear waits for a melodic or rhythmic resolution that will never come. Waiting through the silences also creates a strong tension in the music, as the bursts of remarkably technical musicianship are not always predictable. While this works for the band, the album can be quite flat. The atonality makes much of the music easy to forget - no hook, no chorus.  While it is remarkable for absences and silences, emptiness here is more interesting conceptually than it is musically. After stripping away traditional melody the band is left with texture and unfortunately that texture is oftentimes too flat. While it frequently leaves me impatient, this is an interesting album with spark of brilliance. It is entirely possible that this impatience is exactly what the band intended, but Ehnahre may have done too well conceptually for their own good.

Cold Blank Stare - The Human Condition: Insights Into Madness

Cold Blank Stare - The Human Condition: Insights Into Madness

With this album the one-man band Cold Blank Stare manages to rise above the innumerable hoards of profoundly awful solo black metal projects out there. While by no means a pinnacle of the genre, “The Human Condition” is enjoyable, coherent, and oddly addictive.

The key to the album’s success is how frontman D.A. Siano expertly hooks together simple riffs on the lead guitar with equally straightforward bass and rhythm work. Unfortunately this strength is also inexorably intertwined with the album’s major weaknesses: a tinny, thin, and unusually clean lead guitar tone. The lead guitar tone here sounds like something you might hear coming out of a practice amp, really bad. Prime examples of this tone sticking out are at the very start of the album and during the first riff used in “Covered In Blood.”

Although the lead guitar sounds really poor on its own, its jangling tinny tone does not really jump out too much other than in the above examples. When listening to the album holistically, the jangling comes off as somewhat natural. The same is also true of the programmed-sounding drums. While anyone paying attention to them would say their timbre is flat, the drums never seriously hamper the album’s enjoyability. Cold Blank Stare gets away with this only because of how well put together the songs are. Drums in particular are tactfully composed and manage to be a bother at only one point during the album.

“The Human Condition” is well composed despite its simplicity. Songs on average probably have around four riffs but manage to stay dynamic and generate some atmosphere. As the heavier elements in the mix drown out the weaker elements, each song almost forces the listener to remain attentive. Melodies jangle out rather subtlety due to the quieter lead guitar and with the shifting rhythm and bass notes this serves as a mesmerizing backdrop for the strong vocal work. This draws the listener deeper into the song. The use of simple and sparse riffs and short melodic ideas is compositionally similar to Burzum but the overall approach results in a more traditionally aggressive black metal sound. Jangling as the lead guitar may be, its acerbic sound also serves to highlight a tortured, aggressive, and dissonant feel in the music. Dissonance is not something you would normally expect in such high quantities with stripped down black metal.

D.A. Siano has a damn powerful voice with an unusually strong and fast attack. By this I mean that whenever vocal part starts, the raspy bleating is instantly loud and powerful. This is similar to how N. Imperial’s vocals work sound-wise, although the actual vocals here sound much more in the traditional black metal style. With each syllable in the lyrics effortlessly and powerfully articulated it serves to emphasis the aggressive aspects of the album. Moreover, this allows the vocals to help push the songs forward despite the liberal use of structural repetition. What is disappointing is how vocally everything stays somewhat middle of the road and flat. With such a powerful voice it leaves me wanting to hear faster singing and longer drawn out screams.

Overall the songs fit well very together stylistically with the absolutely glaring exception of “Apostatize” which uses thrashy traditional metal riffs with doubled up vocal shouts. The song has good riffs and is  put together in the same manner as everything else in the album, but it really comes far out of left field. It almost sounds like the band was trying to do a cover.

Following this is another outlier song, “That Which Cannot Be Unseen” where the vocal style initially switches to a low, nasal, Attila-type rumble. Much more bass laden than everything else, this song serves as the highlight of the album rather than sticking out of place. This time Cold Blank Stare bends the jangling guitar from one note to another in the main riff as the rhythm keeps pulsing along. Consequently, we get to hear some kind of amorphous blob of sound that is simultaneously heavy and hypnotic. Everything about Cold Blank Stare’s writing style goes exactly right on this track. It flows so well you can listen to it over and over again. The only weak point is that the hi-hat sounds overbearingly fake/bad when it sounds off in 16th note bursts, which is odd because the drumming works so well elsewhere on the album.

Ultimately, “The Human Condition” does not pop out as anything astonishingly novel or fantastic, but Cold Blank Stare has provided a serviceable black metal album with enough charm to deserve repeated listens. In the same way a good stone mason can build a quality wall while using imperfect bricks the rough and unpolished aspects in this music do not ruin the work as a whole but are certainly noticeable.
 
Note - As of the time of this post the entire album can be downloaded for free at D.A. Siano's blog: http://www.dasiano.blogspot.com/

New England Metal: Eerie, Inverticrux, Suicide Dream, Dark Passenger @ Milly's Tavern 10/15/11

It was just last month when Milly's Tavern in Manchester, NH experienced the fortune of hosting four New England metal bands. Below are my thoughts on the show. Though I do not pretend to be able to review any band with just one listen, I attempt to give a description of the music for anyone that may be interested. More importantly, I have attempted to provide a working link to each band's music so people can have a listen for themselves.

Eerie (New Hampshire)

Eerie is a doomy slower band, with a very nice wide sound. By this I mean the music felt like it was enveloping me with a blanket of notes ranging from high to low. Eerie's wide chord heavy sound stands in stark contrast to the approach of some drone influenced bands that sometimes harp on single notes. Alternating between drawn out chords and more melodic riffing while using that switch to slowly build energy, Eerie also supplied a compelling progression of volume. In pulling back a bit with this style for another song, the band showed more of its compositional range with a soft two chord intro, ripe with delay effects. Adding layers of droney chords between, the band's sound reminded me of the richness of Earth's "The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull" yet sounding noticeably darker. Eerie at one point used a recurring bimodal A-B song structure where the musical development occurred through layering and melodic alterations, creating a dynamic sound without loosing the overall atmosphere. The frequent pentatonic fills created a familiarity in the music while the wide chords served for the requisite heaviness. Intensity swelled and diminished tidally.

I picked up Eerie's demo "Amplifier Theosophy" and will likely post a review of it here. For now, it suffices to say that I recommend you try to buy a copy. The correct ordering information appears to be here: http://opalsoundstudio.com/about

You can listen to Eeire here: Eerie's Reverb Nation page

Inverticrux (New Hampshire)

What immediately jumps out about this band is how the singer absorbs himself in the music. His entire body was shaking as he gesticulated toward the audience, cane in one hand, inverted cross microphone in the other, and all the while with an enormous grimace on his face. The music is a crunchy and heavy mix of enough influences to make it fairly unique and difficult to pigeonhole, but the black metal and Kind Diamond influences are clear.

Inverticrux opened up one of their songs bluntly telling the audience "I have a cautionary tale to tell you, and you're not going to like it, but you're gonna listen." Briefly ignoring the vocals, the cadence of the tremolo and the heavier riffs reminded me a bit of the post-Panzerfaust Darkthrone but, to reiterate, the influences are certainly varied and the band did not end up sounding too similar to anything else but had a macabre and spooky vibe. The vocals came through in what was often a baritone range, but frequently soaring above it in what to me sounded like the clearest Kind Diamond influence. However, Inverticrux also shared Kind Diamond's proclivity toward narrative type songs. Instrument wise, a few lightening fast solos acted more for purposes of energy than their melody, and the bass player was not at all afraid to walk the notes around freely. Dual guitars helped the bass become independent while also maintaining the rhythm against which the solos could contrast. The drumming was tactful and apt for music's mood.

I decline to spoil all of the stage antics I saw so that others may still be surprised. I will leave you with this visual though:  at one point the singer was riding on those toy horse things that are just a horse's head on a stick (kind of creepy now that I think about it, check this out: Vikings also used to put severed horse's heads on poles. Pretty Metal: The Nithing Pole)

You can listen to Inverticrux here: Inverticrux's Reverb Nation Page

Suicide Dream (Connecticut/Massachusetts)

Suicide Dream had a female singer with a surprisingly husky voice, high gain guitars, and martial drumming. Traditional metal influences abound, but the lead guitar lines repeatedly went into a very smooth sound. Utilizing a technique known as tapping, this created a drastic switch when the music turned to a faster thrash sound. As the first song sounded through the venue I again noticed rather sonorous ascending lead melodies. Synthesizers reinforced the song structures and along with the guitars, created a consonance that battled with the grittier vocals.  When higher pitched vocals stormed into the music, they blended in more so than the primary vocal style. These higher vocals were also more powerful. Suicide Dream then followed up with a Maiden cover, and it was here that the band illustrated how tight they were, particularly with the sharp clean drumming fills. Suicide Dream's guitar player clearly loves tapping solos and using legato slide technique. Next was a Type O Negative cover, and Suicide Dream successfully captured TON's heaviness while still incorporating their own sound into the song.

You can listen to Suicide Dream here: Suicide Dream's Website, with MP3s

Dark Passenger (Massachusetts)

Dissonant, diminished, and crushingly heavy. Dark Passenger's dual vocals simultaneously attacked with low gutturals and high screeching in a way that immediately grabs attention. Uncanny and almost soft melodic grooves alternated with rhythmic diminished flourishes creating a forward momentum complemented by furious and pummeling double-bass drumming. Surprisingly, the band even mixed in some clean vocals. Genre wise, the band was on the technical side somewhere along the hazy line between black and death metal. The black metal influence was very clear when the band quickly broke into a straight black metal outro for one of the songs. For each song, the riffs flowed into one another in a rather linear, as opposed to repetitive, fashion. Dark Passenger's dual approach to vocals was also echoed by their guitar work which was often polyphonic (more than one melody at once). Perhaps it is just my own ignorance of music but at one point I heard Dissection type melodies but without that Gothenburg style harmonization. Once again during this evening there was a band with a wide range of influences as far as genres go. Dark Passenger often reminded me of another local band, December Wolves, which is unsurprising as I believe one of the members of that band is involved with Dark Passenger. 

You can listen to Dark Passenger here: Dark Passenger's Facebook page, (scroll down a bit for youtube video link)

Sigh - Scenario IV: Dread Dreams

Sigh - Scenario IV: Dread Dreams

This album is largely an experimental facade masking a musical core composed primarily of mediocre heavy metal guitar riffs with monotone black metal vocals. While Sigh could have brought together all of the ornamental aspects of the music to make a quality album, what we have here is just far too incoherent. Certain elements seem to have been added as an afterthought. Take for example the piano outro on “Diabolic Suicide” or the intro of the following song “Infernal Cries.”

Primarily the problem lies with the guitar work. With one notable exception, the guitar riffs are very forgettable. Unfortunately, these riffs also act as the heart of the album. The framework is mostly tired, old, and all too familiar power chord progressions. No amount of clever instrumentation, random interludes, or suicidal chants can construct an excellent album with such a weak core. Additionally, the guitar solos mirror the main guitar work. Far too many times the listener is subjected to really trashy pentatonic noodling.

The one notable guitar exception to the boring guitars you ask? Have a listen to the riff at about 5:20 into “Iconoclasm in the 4th Desert.” Over that galloping triplet filled riff, vocalist Mr. Mirai Kawashima finally sings with some rhythmic and dynamic flair. He belts out a triumphant and hateful “You deserve the soul desert.” Circus elements act only as a reinforcing background and acoustic guitar strumming provides an additional glue. Interestingly, Mr. Kawashima does everything on the album except for the guitars and drums. Seeing how the drums are as lackluster as the guitars it takes little effort to see the source of Sigh’s creative elements.

Mr. Kawashima’s flat monotonous black metal styled vocals act as a glue to help hold the otherwise schizophrenic album together. However, the raw rasp is really unsuitable for the circus. Times of random revelry require something a little less abrasive and a little more dynamic. The harsh vocals sound honed in, as if coming from a  rhetoritician’s rehearsed harangue impersonating a metal vocalist. The female vocals and clean male vocals on the other hand are solidly performed and more much appropriate for the music.

As shown above, Dread Dreams is not entirely bad. At times the whimsical randomness of the songs creates fairly enjoyable moments in the same way that all the nonsense at a carnival or a circus can be momentarily entertaining. This kind of circus-metal sound is a common problem that should be familiar to anyone who listens to experimental metal bands. With a large supply of creativity, Sigh, like others before them, end up highlighting a weak attention span that would go unnoticed in more musically conservative bands.

Another example of why the album is salvageable is the song “Severed Ways.” Opening with baroque sounding harpsichord noodling, the song quickly moves to the best use of Sigh’s guitar tone and song structuring. In a recurring riff, the synth kicks in over a somber guitar, a soft choir, and rolling bass, culminating in spectacular show of what Sigh is capable of. By pulling back the jarring insanity, Sigh temporarily asserts a bold atmosphere. In the song’s apogee, we have a solo that is executed so well that the listener can almost forget how close it strides to rehashing stock pentatonic noodling. Of course Sigh’s attention span at this point is stretched beyond repair, so the song ends with a happy fanfare followed by sad piano work.

If “Dread Dreams” is like an Alztheimer’s patient meandering out of the house at night, then “Severed Ways” is that rare occasion when the patient gallantly returns home in a lucid moment. The guitar solo is the scene when the patient walks through the door to greet loved ones he had not remembered for years. Unfortunately this moment passes and the rest of the album is more like Alztheimer’s.

In the first few listens of “Dread Dreams,”  you are rewarded with novelty. A wide array of instruments and samples litter the album, again see “Diabolic Suicide” for metal riffs punctuated with cheesy triumphant 80s sounding brass. We even get organ, piano, choir, assorted synths, sirens, and  even wind sample. After a while though, these elements become tiresome and gimmicky ornaments for music that is often boring.

In the end we have a prime example of the carnival/circus metal problem - more ideas than the artist can present in an effective way so the listener is just left with the sensation they are supposed to oooo and ahhhh at all the nonsense going on. The radical transitions from one idea to the next interrupt Sigh’s momentary glimpses of beauty, making the album a frustrating listen. 

Circle of Ouroborus - Unituli

Circle of Ouroborus - Unituli

What black metal sounds like when you are drinking

For anyone familiar with the effects of alcohol, “Unituli” should provide for a similar experience. Indeend, though Circle of Ouroborus creates music soberly, the music itself sounds like what an inebriated listener would hear when a live black metal band is playing. 

A thick haze of reverb hangs over the music as if each and every sound bouncing off of your eardrum is forced to struggle through thick, vodka saturated blood, thus preventing any hope of prompt aural perceptions reaching your brain. The reverb here constantly goes far beyond what is normal for most music and even pushes the limits of how much reverb is normally useable for a black metal band. This results in the music sounding far away, but only because the listener is down the hallway leaning over a toilet in an echoey restroom. With such an unusual amount of reverb, the album amplifies the sensation that one is listening to a live recording, yet it all retains a very listenable quality. 

For example, Antti Klemi’s vocals stand out as the most striking and memorable aspect of “Unituli.” While being drowned in reverb like everything else, the underlying style is quite unusual. The vast majority of the lyrics are presented in a melodic but almost spoken style. While a speaker of Finnish may find this as a clear way to present the lyrics, everyone else is given a foreign language that the reverb makes even more unintelligible. Again, this reenforces the sensation of drunkenness. 

Atmospheric black metal is likely the best label to apply to the music’s end result. At times, tremolo picking rings out in a way that sounds as if a synthesizer was creating all of the guitar sounds. Though contrary to usual practice for the genre, Circle of Ouroborus seems to have cut out a lot of the high end guitar frequencies. Often, this buries the melody as the drum’s snare and hi-hat ring out and overtake the hissing role normally played by black metal guitars. Even when the guitars slow down, as they frequently do, the melody sounds buried.

This same melody burying effect makes “Unituli” something worth listening to more than once. While chord progressions pour through the mix creating the overall atmosphere, quiet higher melodies flicker in and out of the background like unreachable fireflies peppering the night sky in an ever changing reticulation. These melodies feel effervescent not just because they are so quiet, but also because they never provide a strong sense of where one riff ends and the next starts. 

The riff about 80 seconds into the song “Aamusta” is an excellent example of this phenomena. There, the guitar trades off between placing chords or single notes in the forefront, thus creating a lot of energy that never really reaches a melodic resolution. However, “Lahoan” is the album’s standout track and an even better example.  “Lahoan” features plenty of long fadeout shouting, a melody so quiet it feels like you are hearing a secret, and smooth guitar lines that will slowly seep into your body.

Oddly enough, the DSBM style appears to have some minor influence on the album, as evinced by the dissonant and melancholic opening riff. Circle of Ouroborus best illustrates how DSBM can be incorporated into more atmospheric music on the song “Unohduksen Puistossa.” Riffs alternate between being rather upbeat with faster drumming and slow tortured riffs that would not be out of place being repeated ad nauseam in a Xasthur song. This mix makes the music as a whole more dynamic. Even through the constant haze of reverb, the changing tempos punctuate the music like memories in an evening of excess revelry. 

While most music sounds muddled in such a reverb laden atmosphere, “Unituli” somehow creates an enjoyable experience. The notes, and even your memory of them, may come out as a blur, but overall the album is very pleasant as you experience it. Afterwards, you may be left less satisfied and wondering where 40 odd minutes of your life went, yet many listeners may still retain a fond if not hazy memory of “Unituli.” 

Local Band Review (Massachusetts): Planet Gemini - Cauldron of Fuzz: SiX”

Though it may not be the most prudent of ideas to have the first local band review be fairly negative, we hope readers will understand that we are not pulling any punches just to help out locals. So when a local band gets a great review, you will know I mean it. Furthermore, everyone has their own set of musical tastes.

Fans of heavy/doom metal that are into local music should probably give the band a listen for themselves as the album can be downloaded for free from the band’s official website here: http://www.planetgemini.net/

Anyways, here is the review:

Cauldron of Cheese

Planet Gemini’s “Cauldron of Fuzz: SiX” has the same level of quality as part six to some horror movie is likely to have. Possibly satisfying for hardcore fans, but ultimately, generic. This comparison is particularly apt, given that the fourth installation was titled: “Cauldron of Fuzz IV (The Finale).”

So, what happens two Cauldrons after the finale? Not much. We have some remarkably straightforward and average heavy metal with doom influences. If you have heard any amount of heavy or doom metal before, then listening to this album will not provide you with any new experiences or memories. The band’s own official blog provides listeners with a revealing description: “An album that was basically written and recorded within a week or so and done with a BROKEN WRIST none the less.”

Having the album done in only a week does seem entirely plausible given the lackluster songwriting. The broken wrist part however belies the fact that everything on the album is actually professionally executed.

Despite being well done, this album has a few types of cheese. Cheddar, Swiss, and I believe there may even be some Roquefort. It ends up not mattering a whole lot because the end result just comes off as supremely cheesy. Silly samples from what I assume are B horror films are dropped into the album with the same care that someone salts icy walkways in winter. There is a general purpose, but no real thought into where each piece lands.

It does not stop with the samples though, cheese continually cascades down the Cauldron. The worst part is a close tie between the trashy pentatonic melodic runs and the almost glam rock sounding tapping used in place of proper guitar solos. It does not end there, the Cauldron that is dripping with cheese is also, unsurprisingly, filled with cheese.

When a male vocalist chooses to sing particularly high notes, he will go into what we call the falsetto register. Here, Planet Gemini tangentially approaches that range, but rarely pushes through. The result is an at times irritating reminder of the glam bands of past, the most bitter of cheeses in metal.

While the vocal double tracking helps a bit, this sound merely reveals that Planet Gemini’s influences in metal are perhaps more mainstream and older than other bands in the genre. This theory comports with the almost rock-like song structures and pentatonic phrasing that appear throughout the album. The band’s conservative approach makes it so that the songs are satisfying, in so far as they are predictable.

Given that the album is well done and fairly close to metal’s tradition, it ends up being somewhat enjoyable as a whole. Though there is not a ton of replay value, the guitars have a nice and thick tone and the songs are heavy. “Cauldron of Fuzz: SiX” is perfectly suitable for background metal. There are satisfactory uses of flange effects, appropriate drumming techniques, and consistent songs. Yet the songs are consistent to the point where it almost becomes a chore to carefully listen to at times.

Take “To Conjur the Silver Sunset” as an example. A bar or two of music before the solo, which is several minutes into the song, and the listener has genuine cause to be frustrated. Luckily, the song works as a representative sample for “Cauldron of Fuzz: SiX” and a fine solo pops on in to keep things interesting. But even in that moment, the solo is only enough to maintain momentum in the same way that an obese person may cross the finish line of a race and still be no where near first place. Still, some momentum is there and that deserves some credit.

The best song on here is probably “The Offering.” The interplay between basic strumming and slow crushing riffs works perfectly for the band’s style. Even here though, the lyrics still come off as something a person who hates metal would write as a parody. Planet Gemini rises above this deficiency through spot on vocal work. Even though the moment is fleeting, those mostly irritating vocals fit perfectly with the song and everything briefly fits together.

Next time you are walking through a crowded street and see a caricature artist, contemplate whether that person could draw something genuinely wonderful if they sat down and put more than a hour or so into their work. For now, we are stuck with similar speculations about Planet Gemini taking more than a week to write this album.

Mysticum - In the Streams of Inferno

“With my Master the Devil my Friend”

Aggression is such a common feature in metal, that we often take for granted the value of musical violence. Mysticum’s “In the Streams of Inferno” is a special instance of aggression because of how well each part of the music forms into a cohesive whole, similar to how fingers form a fist. This album is a monument to industrial black metal, and fans of black metal in general will not be disappointed.

The vocals here are incredibly harsh and savage, even by black metal standards. High pitched and reverb saturated screeching permeates the album; for reference, think of Ihsahn’s vocals before “In the Nightside Eclipse.” Guitars likewise come across as inhuman, the standard tremolo picking of black metal is almost indiscernible because the high-gain ultra-treble tone makes the notes fall seamlessly, one after another. A chainsaw rips through wood by using many tiny blades acting as one.

Mysticum does more than just subject the listener to endless tremolo strumming, we are also given heavy palm muted riffs to complement the all ready pounding drums. If you can listen to this album without picturing rusty gears grinding above a raging lava flow, then you have no imagination. Speaking of drums, here we have a machine rather than a real drummer, and this in no way detracts from the music. The drums’ empty mechanical nature fit the music just as aptly as Godflesh’s “Streetcleaner” did for that album. This more industrial sounding style should be no problem for fans of Thorns, or Samael. However, unlike Samael’s dance music period, “In the Streams of Inferno” is savage black metal through and through.

The synths and vocal samples give off a slight campy sci-fi feel, which provides an excellent break for the otherwise unrelenting music. Take for example the best song off the album, “Crypt of Fear.” It opens with a long synth intro that walks on the proper side of the fine line in metal between cheesy and fantastic. After that, you are subjected to a blood curdling scream, dual vocal work, heart-pounding drumming, and that chainsaw guitar. Even the most hypnagogic of listeners will feel this album pulse through their arteries.

An additional reason for this album’s excellence is how the songs carry so much momentum. As the album progresses with each wave of notes over the pounding drum machine, you get a feeling of inevitability. Just as a song starts to get stale, other bands would throw in some filler. Mysticum however, continues to deliver the goods by adding something interesting, such as light touch of synthesizer. “In the Streams of Inferno” closes with low rumbling, creepy piano, and unsettling yet angelic vocals. This pacing is perfect and serves as a cool down from the strenuous music that it follows. It is evocative of the album’s cover art because it sounds as if you are listening to the roaring of a river in hell, or perhaps “In the Streams of Inferno.”

Also, here are some extrinsic background reasons why Mysticum is awesome:

1.) Too tough to wear shirts in band photos. See above picture for reference.

2.) Angry message to fans on website illustrating a poor grasp of the English language and an excellent grasp of aggression. "Mysticum are representing total destruction." See http://www.mysticum.com/

3.) The band offers this release for free download on their website, linked above, so you have absolutely no excuse not to listen.