Andrew Reilly, Author at ALARM

The Metal Examiner: Arkan’s Salam

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Arkan: Salam (Season of Mist, 4/18/11)

Arkan: “Origins”

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Despite some great successes, aspirations to incorporate “world” music into metal has also managed to sink countless bands along the way. Ambition and intention aside, most efforts came off as gimmicky or, even worse, just plain silly.

French melodic-death-metal outfit Arkan showed that it was the real deal with its 2008 debut, Hilal, by delivering on the promise of a more Eastern brand of metal — one not just splashed with Arabian and Occidental influences but fully fused with them. Whereas some bands merely branch out into Eastern sounds, Arkan emerges with fully planted roots. Hilal was not perfect, but the follow-up, Salam (Arabic for “peace”), picks up where its predecessor left off, smoothing out what rough edges existed and pushing the band’s sound to its limit.

The Metal Examiner: A Storm Of Light’s As the Valley of Death Becomes Us, Our Silver Memories Fade

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

A Storm Of Light: As the Valley of Death Becomes Us, Our Silver Memories Fade (Profound Lore, 5/17/11)

A Storm Of Light: “Destroyer”

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Since its inception, Josh Graham’s A Storm Of Light has adopted a model that’s based squarely on collective evolution, be it in something as complex as its musical aspirations or something as simple as its personnel. With its fourth release, As the Valley of Death Becomes Us, Our Silver Memories Fade, the group seemingly moves a little further from its loose “project” designation yet seemingly keeps the “band” label at arm’s length.

With its sound rooted firmly in no-frills rock, Valley’s style could best be described as “talk metal” or, barring that, “verbal doom.” Graham’s vocals tend to avoid conventional melody, or at least anything too advanced, instead coming off more as pitched declarations of ideology over the anvil attack of bassist Dominic Seita and newcomer drummer B.J. Graves. Though the obvious comparisons to contemporaries Neurosis or Unsane will make sense, Valley really borrows more heavily from mid-1990s hard rock — the half-spoken, hard-truth heaviness of Rollins Band, or the sludgy Sabbath nods of Soundgarden (fittingly, guitarist Kim Thayil pops in for a pair of guest spots: “Missing” and “Black Wolves”). The chugging “Collapse” evokes a less tom-reliant form of Tool, and the environmentalist-turned-existentialist “Destroyer” finally explains what a Queensrÿche / Alice in Chains / Rage Against the Machine collaboration might have sounded like.

The Metal Examiner: Liturgy’s Aesthethica

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Liturgy: Aesthethica (Thrill Jockey, 5/10/11)

Liturgy: “Returner”

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For a moment, Brooklyn-based quartet Liturgy seemed poised to steer black metal into a bold new direction. Renihilation, the group’s debut full-length from 2009, showed that even while employing the classic tenets of black metal, it was possible to push the genre forward and put it in a more efficient package. Yet whereas that album made a statement, the band’s follow-up, Aesthethica, turns many of those tactics into a mere reminder.

Liturgy comes armed once more with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s mostly indecipherable howl and quasi-anthemic guitar lines blasted with co-pilot Bernard Gann, both positioned over Greg Fox’s machine-gun drumming and Tyler Dusenbury’s frenetic bass lines. But rather than let its pieces work alongside each other, Liturgy places its components atop each other, turning its formidable wall of sound into an unfiltered onslaught.

By most standards, Liturgy still has a fairly forward-thinking vision of what black metal can be, reaching out of the genre playbook at will. Odd-pattern tremolo picking gives “Tragic Laurel” a progressive feel that leaves the door open for the sucker punch of its main section, and “True Will” stacks layers of screams over a seesaw chord progression, interrupted only by a skipping-CD breakdown.

The Metal Examiner: Saille’s Irreversible Decay

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Saille: Irreversible Decay (Code666 Records, 3/4/11)

Saille: “Plaigh Allais”

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Though the genre arguably has lulled for the better part of the past decade, symphonic-metal creators and consumers alike have welcomed any possible heirs to Emperor’s long-abdicated throne. With Irreversible Decay, Belgian five-piece (nine-piece, if you count the in-studio classical personnel) Saille throws its hat into the ring by way of nine tracks that are mostly symphonic in intention, even if not always in execution, and definitely leaning more towards the “black metal” part of the label.

Coupling moments of nominal tastefulness (the acoustic guitar fueling intro track “Nomen,” the quasi-classical breakdown in “Maere”) with wider expanses of muddied percussion and thrashing guitars, Irreversible Decay quickly reveals itself firmly planted in the genre’s time-honored blueprint. Cellos and violins float over acoustic guitars — but only over the acoustic guitars. Saille respects its ambitions but also very blatantly segregates them from each other, resulting in music that constantly sounds as though it’s hedging its bets.

The Metal Examiner: Scale The Summit’s The Collective

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Scale The Summit: The Collective (Prosthetic Records, 3/1/11)

Scale the Summit: “Gallows”

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For reasons unknown, aspiring metal-leaning instrumental outfits once found themselves stuck with a forced, false choice between ambience and technicality. To get any kind of notice, it was assumed that a band had to either destroy its listeners with audio acrobatics or surrender all such pretense and hope that its atmospherics were heavy enough on their own.

But as metal circles are wont to do, styles eventually overlapped, and as bands figured out that it was okay to employ both (or, in some cases, neither), pyrotechnics developed a working alliance with atmospherics. A new wave of more flexible instrumental outfits was born, and with it came Texas quartet Scale The Summit.

Though its first two releases sounded more like the work of a classical prog-metal band learning to live without a singer, The Collective finds the foursome more at ease with its sound and crafting true instrumental rock, rather than merely writing songs without words. Those previous releases often let the arrangements merely imply melodies with the band’s impeccable musicianship providing the momentum; this third time around, Scale The Summit has adopted an almost jazz-like approach to its songs, with each instrument taking turns in the spotlight as often as the band as a whole plays a musical follow-the-leader.

The Metal Examiner: Total Fucking Destruction’s Hater

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Total Fucking Destruction: Hater (Translation Loss, 2/15/11)

Total Fucking Destruction: “Thrashadelphia”

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Given the relatively straightforward demands of grindcore, any band willing to name itself Total Fucking Destruction should know what’s expected of it. Conversely, even the most casual grindcore enthusiast probably knows what to expect from a band named Total Fucking Destruction. With Hater, the Philadelphia quartet holds up its end of the bargain, but in such spastic fashion that even the most dedicated are likely to be left in a perpetual double-take.

Hater’s 27 tracks come instilled with a musical hostility equaled only by the comically abrasive song titles (“Murdernumber,” “Hate Mongering Pig Pandemonium”), all taken to absurd heights through a near-constant everything-at-once approach. Built primarily on a foundation of furious drumming, speed-metal riffing, and stream-of-consciousness anti-authoritarianism, Hater at times flexes a kind of accidental atonality not quite Zappa-esque, but more like Slayer if Slayer abandoned the concept of riffs and played at quintuple-time.

The Metal Examiner: Augury’s Concealed

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Augury: Concealed (Sonic Unyon, 3/8/11)

Augury: “Alien Shores”

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Though Quebec-based death-prog band Augury earned rave reviews in the metal press with its 2009 release, Fragmentary Evidence, its 2004 debut, Concealed, went largely unnoticed at the time, save for some devotees on the fringe. A reissue of that disc doesn’t lessen any of its original challenge, but it may well give fans of technical metal something new to cheer about.

Newcomers beware: Concealed is not an easy listen. The individual tracks (“songs” isn’t always the correct term; “sequences” may work better) live and die by their constant shifts, resulting in music that seems as difficult for a listener to follow as it is for the musician to play. Throw in Augury’s steadfast devotion to its tone and sonic aesthetics, and what begins as a promising suite can end up as a stream-of-consciousness barrage of sound. This is technical music that goes beyond technique — beyond mere “math rock” — into its own brand of astrophysical metal.

The Metal Examiner: Weedeater’s Jason…The Dragon

Weedeater: Jason…The Dragon (Southern Lord, 3/1/11)

Weedeater: “Mancoon”
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North Carolina-based Weedeater has always balanced its stoner- and sludge-metal aspirations with a wide-open embrace of not just Southern rock but Southern culture as well. Songs about Dale Earnhardt sit alongside Lynyrd Skynyrd covers; odes to mystical demons were right at home alongside ballads praising the band’s titular indulgence.

But despite some commendable efforts (especially the group’s previous disc, God Luck And Good Speed in 2007), these two directions never fully reconciled, and the band’s masterpiece always seemed just out of its reach. Jason…The Dragon, the group’s fourth full-length (and second for Southern Lord), doesn’t quite put the group over the top of the mountain, but it’s never for lack of trying.

The Metal Examiner: Theologian’s The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face

Theologian: The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face (Crucial Blast, 11/9/10)

Theologian: “Zero”

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Though the title paints a grim-enough picture, the actual contents of The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face, the debut from Lee Bartow’s Theologian project, use conventional metal misery as merely a springboard. The ends form the expected stew of claustrophobic suffering, but the means show Bartow to be a most cunning doom practitioner.

The Metal Examiner: Bruce Lamont’s Feral Songs For The Epic Decline

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Bruce Lamont: Feral Songs for the Epic Decline (At a Loss, 1/25/11)

Bruce Lamont: “2 Then The 3”

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Having spent a decade as the voice and one-man horn section of post-metal outfit Yakuza, Bruce Lamont’s name has become synonymous with “metal plus saxophone,” an all-too-oversimplified yet all-too-useful shorthand description of that band’s output. But outside of his main group, Lamont has readily (and more frequently) contributed to a number of distinctly non-metal productions, resulting in a body of work that has little in common, sonically speaking, with his most commonly identified (and most actively self-identified) act.

With Feral Songs For The Epic Decline, Lamont’s first proper solo album, the elements that he has always brought to the table remain fully intact, yet never in a predictable way. Though the foreboding atmospherics persist, Lamont has foregone most conventions of common (and even uncommon) metal and assembled something closer to the spaced-out soundtrack to some kind of indescribable psychological nightmare: less physical aggression but considerably more mental warfare.

The Metal Examiner: The Ocean’s Anthropocentric

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

The Ocean: Anthropocentric (Metal Blade, 11/9/10)

Since its inception, German post-metal collective The Ocean has relied on over-the-top lyrical ambition as much as straight-ahead musical progression. Earlier this year, the group began its long-form, anti-fundamentalism diatribe with Heliocentric. With that album’s counterpart, Anthropocentric, The Ocean brings its musings full circle, and brings a unique (if sometimes difficult) vision of metal back with it.

The album’s opening title track fires full-bore with pounding toms and a throat-shredding roar, but by the end of its nine minutes, the primal rage has yielded to a swaying, almost anthemic coda. The obvious comparison is to peers Isis or 3, but at its heart, the band more closely follows Iron Maiden — not just because the group doesn’t hesitate to peel back the layers mid-song, but also because it doesn’t hesitate to remind listeners that its members read books (Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to name only the three overtly referenced authors).

The Metal Examiner: Intronaut’s Valley Of Smoke

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Intronaut: Valley of Smoke (Century Media, 10/12/10)

Intronaut: “Elegy”
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Intronaut made its name in forward-thinking metal circles by understanding that pure metal moments hit harder by sandwiching them between other styles — in this case, passages that are closer to fusion or jazz. Rather than a guitar spotlight, the group reaches for a fretless bass solo; in lieu of a unison run, Intronaut deploys a spacey, percussive breakdown.

But whereas the group’s previous releases (especially Prehistoricisms in 2008) suggested a band poised squarely in art-metal territory, Valley Of Smoke shows the band moving simultaneously toward and away from modern metal. It’s moving toward in its increasingly overt nods to the group’s sonic peers (Neurosis, Isis, and, at times, Pelican), but away in its refusal to ever really stick to one thing at a time, resulting in a disc that’s not easily classifiable as metal, but not easily classifiable as anything else either.