Ancient Necropsy - Sanctuary Beyond The Infinite...

You know what? I've been trying to find a way to start this review in my usual “desperately trying to be funny” style for two weeks now, and I haven't found a single way to do it that would make any sense. I honestly can't find anything to bring up and occupy two paragraphs with. There isn't all that much to make this album stand out. Other people don't appear to like it much, meanwhile I find it excellent. But then I set out to invent combinations of words that would prove Sanctuary Beyond The Infinite... to be worthwhile, and I can't. The truth is that what we have here is an okay release that for some reason is way beyond okay.

You know that first completely obscure band you found on Bandcamp, whose album you listened to once, thought “hey, these guys are really good” and then never listened to ever again? That's exactly what SBTI... resembles. Nondescript album cover, nondescript production and a few ellipses thrown into the track titles for further nondescriptiveness. I especially like the way the instrumental intro, and a good one at that, is called “The Absolute Truth About...”. It gives you a sense of connection between the first track and the second, like if they were the two movements of the musical composition entitled “The Absolute Truth About Limited Golden Keys To The Paradise”. My theories for what that means are that either “Absolute Truth About Ltd.” is a fictional company whose product is a gold plated bong in the shape of a key, or that the lyrics are a PSA about drugs.

Anyway, the most important element in this whole endeavor is the music. It is a concoction that bonds the fast pace and the linear/insane structures of the technical school of brutal death metal with strong sense of progression and riffing that exhibits very melodic tendencies. This sound is good. I like it very much. It is epic. But, to keep with the Bandcamp analogy, that is really all you get from second track to last. No contrasts, no interesting conflicting ideas, only very slight album progression. “The Epitaph Of The Phoenix Arising” lets out a hint at its intentions as a closer, what with having a rather different guitar and drum sound, not to mention a very “final song”-ish section in the middle, but it would have also been perfectly logical if the album were to continue afterwards.

This means that SBTI... relies almost entirely on the strength of the riffs, and that mostly depends on preference. I understand why one wouldn't like what Ivancient is doing regarding the guitar acrobatics on this album: it is kind of generic and pretty simplistic at times, and isn't always that effective. But I am really fond of the riffs, mainly because within the context they give the songs a sense of epicity that is not found in most music. That is also practically the only reason I like this album so much.

I have to remind at this point that we are discussing a sound that is almost guaranteed to fail. You need to have a strong sense of self control and musical maturity to pull it off. Add one detail too many and the whole thing comes crashing down. Don't add enough details, and you succumb into being just another stereotypical Bandcamp act. Just the achievement that is having created  9 songs + 1 of this kind that are neither boring nor terribly jarring justifies giving this one a spin. Let alone the fact that half of these songs are close to perfection, in my opinion. And opinion is really what will make or break this release for a listener. I personally adore it. If you give it a listen and hate it, I perfectly understand.

That is all I had to say. I don't know why I couldn't write it two weeks earlier.

Standout tracks:
Lost At The Eternal Space
Altar Of Fire
Revelations
Sanctuary Beyond The Infinite
Epitaph Of The Phoenix Arising

Ancient Necropsy - Apocalyptic Empire

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