Reviews of metal albums released May 23 – May 29
It’s a triumphant week for the progressive and avant-garde, with some of the most dependable names in the business dropping absolutely stellar work.
Crocell – Swarm Of Insects
Genre: Black/death metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: Denmark’s not exactly a hotbed for black metal, but dig deep enough and you can evidently find some of that Nordic misanthropy simmering down by the bedrock. Crocell have been going since 2007 but never made a huge splash. This album seems to be part of a rejuvenated push from the band, now going full in on the (very) blackened death metal.
This is clearly for the listener who wants misery to come seeping out of their speakers. There’s absolutely an aggressive push on the album as well, but it feels mostly like a means of spreading the hopelessness more effectively. A bit too much of it comes off as fairly anonymous, but every now and then there are glimmers of infernal creativity and a bit of riffing goodness.
Highlight: “Wolfen Man”
Elder – Through Zero
Genre: Progressive/psychedelic rock/metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4.5/5
Review: Elder have become one of those “can do no wrong” bands, which makes reviewing their material a fairly predictable affair in terms of score, but no less a pleasure in the chance it provides to immerse yourself in their music. “Through Zero” is a ride into an alternate version of reality that you take safely strapped in and expertly guided the entire way, never once being at risked of getting shaken off by unexpected turbulence or even mildly inconvenienced by the odd pothole in the road. You arrive having been deeply immersed and undergone a therapeutic kneading of your mental processes.
Elders brand of psychedelic prog is not the one you go to for harshness or a riff-based pummeling, but it earns its “metal” classification by virtue of some decently heavy stoner-like riffs and powerful buildups of intensity. It just takes a while. The most dynamic tracks are also pushed to the fore of the album, making for a fairly protracted and mellow, near-15 minute finish to the experience. That being said, it never bottoms out or even stutters, always staying on the move and delivering new wonders around the next bend.
Highlights: “Capture/Release” and “Strata”
Erdve – Epigrama
Genre: Atmospheric sludge metal/hardcore
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: This Lithuanian band builds on a djent-riffed hardcore foundation with sludgy coarseness, a good deal of melancholic atmosphere and an industrial-grade harsh production. I’m not sure exactly what to compare it to, but if the combination of elements listed above sounds appealing to you, then you’ll very likely have a good time.
Slamming, rhythmic heaviness is the star of the show, but the bitter-tinged melodies are what makes it stick in your mind. To me it doesn’t really move to much away from the stylistic sphere that it establishes with the first couple of tracks, and while it’s not exactly conventional, I also don’t really feel challenged in any particular way. It is, however, quite consistent and confidently performed.
Highlight: “Ydos”
Eternal Evil – Forever Feared
Genre: Thrash/heavy metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: If you like back-to-basics, shredding, aggressive heavy metal the likes of Vulture and Bewitcher, then this should be right up your alley. Swedish band Eternal Evil transport you back to the early days of thrash metal and infuses it with a playful, solo-tastic flair and a pinch of black metal evil.
Parts of this album reminds me of early Trivium, with the desire to round off aggression with melodic memorability and a bit of epic oomph. It also has some of the same early unevenness of said band. Most tracks have sections of seemingly effortless, characterful playfulness, but the way that they get to these sections isn’t always as smooth. A real diamond in the rough, this one.
Highlight: “Eyes Of Wrath”
Funebrarum – Beckoning The Void Of Eternal Silence
Genre: Death metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: How about some malignant old school death metal that’s just dug itself out of the mulch after many years of decomposing hibernation? New Jersey’s Funebrarum haven’t released a full-length since 2009, and the last of anything we got from them was an EP back in 2016. Now the beast has reared its hideous head and is ready to chase you at mid-tempo through the dead gloom of the snow-covered forest on the album cover.
While there’s a surprising amount of faster paced riffing and soloing going on, the dominant feeling is that of wading through a thick layer of thick low-end rumble. The production is quite muted, which suits the feeling of abyssal dread, but robs it of much of the visceral quality it might have had. But if you’re on board with the slightly lumbering style, then you have an album full of brutal highlights to look forward to.
Highlights: “Anhela Odor Mortuoruom (The Adepts)” and “Beckoning the Void of Eternal Silence”
Galvanist – The Silence Between Stars
Genre: Death/doom metal/hardcore
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: If you’re of the opinion that your average nightmarish death doom is in desperate need of more harshness and rhythmic drive, then you are in sync with Montana’s Galvanist. They whip up what would otherwise be a lurching, light-shy behemoth of a creeping terror and send it rampaging with randomly malevolent intent. They also expand on this recipe with plenty of unnerving atmosphere, mildly experimental song progressions and an arresting influx of surprisingly uplifting melody.
Personally I find this to be too much of a clash of styles, with the hardcore rhythms and raw-howling vocals pulling me in a jarringly contrasting direction to the rest. As an experiment though, this is well executed and inarguably boundary-pushing.
Highlight: “Dreich”
Hecate Enthroned – The Corpse Of A Titan, A Lament Long Buried
Genre: Symphonic black/death metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Veteran UK band Hecate Enthroned are back with their first full-length in 7 years, and their seventh overall since starting out in 1995. Given the title of the album, you’d expect a full-on plunge into epic, dark fantasy, and in that you’d be absolutely correct. This is a comprehensive album steeped in atmosphere, and unlike the style of fellow countrymen Cradle of Filth it feels like it’s meant to be taken pretty seriously.
Overall this is a fairly aggressive album, with moments of death metal force, symphonic intensity and thoroughly harsh vocals, which do tend to get locked in to the same style and register for fairly long stretches of time. It’s quite indulgent in terms of interludes and buildups, but if you agree that this is a necessary part of constructing the grandeur of this kind of sound then I think you’ll welcome it all. At its best it’s all-enveloping and hair-raisingly powerful.
Highlight: “A Gallery of Rotting Portraits”
Monolord – Neverending
Genre: Stoner/doom metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Monolord I’d say is one of the go-to bands in metal for consistency. If you know what you like and want more of it, these Swedes are sure to deliver. The formula for their brand of stoner-riff doom metal can be said to be as old as the metal genre itself, with Sabbath being one of the obvious influences and points of comparison. Slow, bluesy groove is the name of the game, and “Neverending” is nothing if not a refinement of this recipe.
As you would hope from a Swedish, old-school-leaning band, the riffs have a real tasty crunch to them. To me they are the star of the show, and I finding myself wanting more of them. I’m not a huge fan of the production, suitably muddled as it might be. The vocals are more then characterful enough that I want them brought forward in the mix, and I’m missing texture. It feels like an album for the purists, and it does what it does solidly. With this obvious songwriting talent though, I find myself hoping for a bit of playfulness that never really arrives.
Highlight: “You Bastard”
The Scalar Process – Agnomysticism
Genre: Technical/progressive metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: It’s not an unproven feat to be able to marry technical, vibrantly melodic complexity with spacey, atmospheric introspection, as exemplified by the likes of Fallujah and Fractal Universe, but it is still very much a feat to be able to do it well. If you’re a fan of the aforementioned bands, might I highly recommend you check out the sophomore full-length French progressive tech-deathers The Scalar Process.
While there’s plenty of mow-you-down precision aggression going on, it doesn’t end up sounding too clinical, and it shares the space fairly equally with more patient, marvel-at-the-wonder-of-the-universe cosmic exploration. While they’re absolutely proficient riffers and shredders, I find myself leaning towards the writing of the melodic sections, and so the tech assaults tend to feel more like a distracting nuisance than fully earned peaks of intensity at times. But there are also plenty of moments where the balance is struck really well.
Highlight: “A Breathing Moment”
Serpent Lord – The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old
Genre: Black metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Serpent Lord is very much the resurrection of a forest demon first brought into the world in the early 2000s, now returned with a debut full length and a well-matured set of pagan maledictions to be cast upon the world. “The Once Forgotten Ways Of Old” definitely carries that feel of being carried on icy winds emanating from a ritual carried out among neolithic ruins.
The music is unmistakably a kind of atmospheric black metal at its core, that’s not really allowed to drift off or take much of a rest underway. There’s melody, great scope, backing vocals, traditional instruments and the like, but not really to the point where it crosses into folk. It feels focused, yet epic – grave, but far from rooted to the spot. I’m missing some truly standout moments, but it’s a solid foundation on which to build. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 20 years.
Highlight: “A Pagan’s Spell”
Devin Townsend – The Moth
Genre: Progressive/symphonic metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4.5/5
Review: Heading into a new Devin Townsend album with any sort of clear expectations, certainly regarding style, is a perilous endeavor. Half the time the man seems to live to take our collective breath away, and the other half he appears to be either daydreaming out loud or actively trolling us. This is a big one though, apparently ten years in the making, and you can tell by more ways than just the daunting number of tracks. This is, for most of its substantial runtime, a truly symphonic, fully orchestrated album, and feels operatic in scope. There are still metal elements, and they are very much recognizably Devin in tone and force of impact, but they are not the “point” of the album.
This is an indulgent passion project that in many ways sums up what Devin is about as a songwriter. It defies you to try to define it – to demand that it should be heavier, faster and more concise. Everything is sort of scaled up and exaggerated. If you love it, you will happily devour it all, like an avid LOTR fan that insists that the ending of Return of the King is perfectly reasonably long if you consider it as the closing of a single, 13-hour movie. It’s an album you have to be prepared to let take you wherever it wants, and trust that it will reward your open-mindedness by pulling out all the bells and whistles, serenades and farts included.
Highlight: “The Big Snit” and “Orion”
Trelldom – …by the word…
Genre: Avant-garde black metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: Wow, if you ever wondered whether black metal still has the ability to pull you out of your comfort zone and conjure shapes in the darkness yet unseen, then trust in this album to confirm this for you. Newly reactivated, Gaahl-fronted Trelldom know how to put the weird back into the subgenre, without sacrificing the projection of actual dark conviction or feeling of partaking in something ill-advised.
“…by the word…” feels like a descent into self-conscious madness, as if embracing a kind of reality distortion as a way of communicating. This is far darker than “Gaahls WYRD”. Not a ton more technically aggressive, but certainly more oppressive. It’s like experiencing the perception of a deranged wraith, only to finally snap out of it and realize that you’ve unwittingly taken part in committing terrible atrocities.
Highlights: “Folding the Mind” and “I Speak Forgotten Voices”
As always, if you think I’m completely off on an observation, unfairly dissed your favorite band, or need to give an album another shot, why not pop a comment down below?
The Metal Dispatch 