Imagine that you have a child, and that this child has made a drawing. They hand you their work. You glance at it, mumble a “That's a very nice drawing of a squiggle, child” and doom it to the Fridge Door of Negligence. You choose the magnet with the perfect enormousness to weakness ratio, so as to increase the likelihood that the magnet will fall off, and to ensure that as much of the drawing as possible is not visible while it hasn't. But just as you're about to stick the printer paper onto the door, where it can be forgotten forever, you suddenly notice that the drawing is actually of an artistic quality comparable to the likes of Michelangelo or da Vinci. That's a plausible allegory for the first experience of listening to Apocalyptic Empire.
All the elements appear to indicate your stumbling upon a relentless onslaught of pedestrian brutal death metal that is here to bore you for approximately twice as long as a usual album of the genre. Before anything else, you are indifferently greeted by a cover that is as unimpressive as it's confusing as hell. I wonder where Ivancient, the sole member of this project, got the idea that a castle that is actually a disintegrating space rocket that is actually a volcano would make for good cover art. Then, you are prepared by an introduction that is more reminiscent of the 80s than the 80s themselves. When the actual music starts, you notice that the production makes everything sound either like processed farts or like processed cooking pots, or like a mixture of the two. The music is nothing special at first either. You have two thin guitars that usually play the same lead, backed by a tupperware drumset. And they spend the songs just skimming through sections with no obvious progression, meanwhile the dynamics are entirely up to the listener's imagination.
But as you dig deeper into the album's nature, some order begins to reveal itself. Something that is not too dissimilar from the notion of song structure becomes noticeable and the guitar exercises used instead of riffs morph into actual riffs. The style of riffing used kind of resembles a more BDM version of The Chasm, interspersed with a unique style of going up and down scales really fast, about one experimental moment per 5 minutes, and a few rare tinges of Lykathea Aflame. If songs were people, the structure of the average song from this album would be what you'd get if all humans mysteriously disappeared and aliens tried to reconstitute what a human looked like with only a toothbrush and a sock as reference.
With these elements, Ancient Necropsy has accomplished the feat of making a surprisingly great album. A very rickety balance between memorability and confusion is kept pretty consistently and the gargantuan length of the album actually works in its favor. The subtle contrast between the first half and the second results in a very rewarding experience as well. The first half mostly experiments with virtually unfollowable structures and aims at destroying rewind buttons. Meanwhile the second is far more straightforward and linear, focusing more on quality riffing. When I say subtle, though, I mean very subtle, like the difference between a bald person and a bald person after they got a haircut. The entire album is confusing and convoluted, and the experience is a 35 minute journey through Whatthehellisgoingonville that offers no chance to take a breath. If you want to make sense of the journey, I wish you luck. I took 6 months to kind of accomplish just that. It was totally worth it, though.
Standout tracks:
Malignant Matters Collapse
Ridiculous Preacher
Injured by Extrasensorial Communication
Undethronement of Inner Power
Old Man Decrepit Frozen
Master Of Knowledge
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