The Metal Examiner Archives

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: Miasmal’s Miasmal

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

Miasmal: Miasmal (Dark Descent, 4/15/2011)

Miasmal: “Toxic Breed”

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Based in the metal-rich city of Gothenburg, Miasmal offers a punk-ish perspective on the classic Swedish death-metal sound. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Swedish bands like Dismember, Unleashed, and Entombed borrowed heavily from Scandinavian hardcore bands such as Anti-Cimex and Bastards, as well as mainland European thrash bands like Sodom and Celtic Frost. As such, the distinctions between metal and punk in Scandinavia are blurrier than they are in some other regions. Miasmal’s music falls on the hardcore-ish end of the death-metal spectrum, which comes as no surprise given that guitarist and vocalist Pontus also plays in Martyrdöd, a crusty hardcore band.

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: Septicflesh’s The Great Mass

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

Septicflesh: The Great Mass (Season of Mist, 4/18/11)

Septicflesh: “The Vampire from Nazareth”

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Metal bands have long employed classical composition techniques. Celtic Frost introduced To Mega Therion in 1985 with a Strauss-ian melody played by a French horn. Morbid Angel cited Mozart as the greatest composer of all time on its sophomore album. Ritchie Blackmore laced his leads for proto-metal band Deep Purple with classical arpeggios.

Continuing in this tradition, Septicflesh‘s guitarist Christos Antoniou recently completed studies in classical composition. As such, the band’s seventh full-length, The Great Mass, is rich in orchestration, handled by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.

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: Amon Amarth’s Surtur Rising

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

Amon Amarth: Surtur Rising (Metal Blade, 3/28/11)

Amon Amarth: “War of the Gods”

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Some hard rock fuels itself on anxiety and doubt, some on an absolute clarity of purpose. Swedish five-piece Amon Amarth stays in the latter camp and pillages it too, playing melodic death-metal songs of fearlessness and bloodthirsty honor. The band’s rune-like fonts and references to Norse myths and Viking battles are only a sign of what’s at the core. Amon Amarth’s power comes not from all the references to Yggdrasil and Asgaard and the like, but from evoking times (real or mythical) in which civilization revolved around the momentous import of war.

Its seamless meld of death-metal agony and Iron Maiden-style songwriting sounds like the man you’d want at your side in combat. He doesn’t bother with a subtle range of emotions, because he’s occupied, from his soul to his skull collection, with a few very solid ones: loyalty, glory-lust, pitiless determination, and pride in his ability to slay.

Our blond-mammoth war buddies don’t much change their outlook on the new Surtur Rising, nor do they tire of it. As with previous triumphs — see Vs. The World from 2003 and Twilight Of The Thunder God from 2008 — the band’s eighth album is carnage writ absolute. Early into opening track “War of the Gods,” it becomes busy with 16th-note drums and tremolo-picked guitar notes, yet it never feels too busy for its own good. For as stately and epic as it is, there’s no fat, no drag of the ponderous. Once again, Amon Amarth is a model of the thrilling interlock that any band should have, whether savaging the underground or longing for shiny hard-rock hooks.

The Metal Examiner: Blaspherian’s Infernal Warriors of Death

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

Blaspherian: Infernal Warriors of Death (Deathgasm Records, 3/8/11)

Blaspherian: “Infernal Warriors of Death”

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The cover art of Infernal Warriors of Death bears a striking resemblance to Dawn of Possession, so it’s no surprise that Blaspherian‘s debut full-length shares quite a bit with early Immolation. Although formed in 2004, Blaspherian is far from prolific, having only released a demo, an EP, and a few splits previous to this recording. Its 2007 EP was a respectable old-school death-metal release, but it was not enough of a unique statement to set it apart from the classic bands of the early ’90s and late ’80s.

However, with Infernal Warriors of Death, Blaspherian has claimed its spot in Texas’ long history of extreme metal. This is crowded territory, as the state has offered up one of the genre’s initial classics in Necrovore‘s Divus de Mortuus demo, underrated technical thrash bands in Rigor Mortis and Dead Horse, and two of the most compelling United States black-metal bands in Absu and Averse Sefira.

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: New Lows’ Harvest of the Carcass

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

New Lows: Harvest of the Carcass (Deathwish Inc., 1/18/11)

New Lows: “Anguish”

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In the early 2000s, members of New Lows were cutting their teeth in Think I Care, playing in Sheer Terror’s tradition of Celtic Frost-worshiping hardcore punk. After the demise of Think I Care, New Lows appeared with an ugly, punishing demo and a similarly aggressive seven-inch record.

The band recorded an LP with CC from Mind Eraser that was initially shelved due to inner turmoil and a near breakup. However, New Lows resumed activities as a band, and Harvest of the Carcass, its proper debut, now sees the light of day, taking the Boston metalcore tradition into a raw and primitive place.

New Lows plays in a style that recalls the crushingly heavy and simplistic late-1980s punk/death-metal hybrid of bands like Asphyx and Bolt Thrower. Bands affiliated with the hardcore scene, like Ringworm and Merauder, have been blending these sounds since the early 1990s. Recently, several hardcore bands have risen to prominence with sounds that are much more death metal than they are Bad Brains. This new crop of bands includes New Lows as well as Nails, Harms Way, and Mammoth Grinder.

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.