Band Of Skulls - Sweet Sour

 


I'd face a total of zero problems writing a list of things that do not, in any physical or metaphorical way, kill you or make you stronger. But that would mean that I'd have to stick a bunch of filler in anticipation to listing this album. Band Of Skulls seem to wholeheartedly agree with the adaptation of the ignorance-bliss theory to the active asininity paradigm, the one that effectively simplifies all that defines stupidity into the stylish four-letter acronym YOLO. So essentially what I'm saying is that you learn absolutely nothing and your outlook on music changes in no way whatsoever from listening to Sweet Sour a bunch of times. This album came out a few months ago, so to quicken things up, I'll explain right away why this review isn't completely irrelevant from my perspective. I bought this album on a whim because the cover is fantastic, thinking that I could at least have a laugh if it were bad. So this is a personal vendetta: I want either my laugh, or my time among the living, or my parents' money back. Since I can't really be contacted directly, I suppose I'll stick to recovering the laugh.

And things don't really start out well for me, because to describe the sound here is to describe the sound of your neighbor's band for any hermit readers out there, which is a rather dull and insulting waste of time, another strike by this landfill of a bunch of sonic information. All the people out there who upon meeting another individual for the first time state, unsolicited, that they have a band that should be checked out by said new acquaintance, via Myspace, no less, use this sound in their music. It is the kind of sound you get either from the desire to get lucky or the desire to get lucky and famous, meanwhile not being sure how either of the scenarios are supposed to work out. The only difference is that the second scenario somehow actually worked out for Band of Skulls. There's a review of this very album on the guardian dot coe dot you kay, I'll have you know! I've no opinion of their previous endeavors with the exception of unconscious bias, but I end up with the idea that they got where they are by following the same “rock out here; stick out lighters here; we compose everything drunk during rehearsals; sing-along chorus here; dynamics out the window” ethos that your neighbor's band follows.

Same simplified old-schoolish rockish sound with riffs that you've heard in your head when you were taking a shit at the train station that one time, accompanied by all the proficient and bland instrumentation and sounds you can get out of a bunch of money and an ordinary old-schoolish rockish band line-up. And that's when they're not doing generic ballads you get from jamming for some minutes and then coming back the next day to add finishing touches. I bet they even send text messages with their lyrics to their “fans”, blegh. They must be the kind of people whose hobby it is to claim that “music nowadays sucks I wish I was born in the 60s so I could be even more smug than I am right now Nicki Minaj hurr hurr”. I'm led to assume that the album cover is a photo of my opinion of them, moments after it escaped my esophagus. They irritate me so much that my bile is bloody, try to top that!

Of course, I wouldn't want to send the wrong message across. If Band Of Skulls are reading this, they can sigh with relief. I haven't vomited in years, so I wouldn't actually know anything about my bile by now. As for Sweet Sour, it's hateful, but not actually bad. It's completely average. Bang in the middle of the bell curve of album quality and totally not worth your time. It's better during the first half and reveals its true nature when the bass distortion kicks in on “Lay My Head Down” to play an extremely boring sequence of intervals, followed by a disappointing “heartfelt” bluesy guitar solo. After that moment, you can't help but imagine the smug looks on these guys' faces as they indulge in their belief that they're utterly brilliant. I'm not basing my score on such childish factors as my unfounded and stupid opinion that these guys be obnoxious fucks, but the conviction with which they choose to be generic and uninspired and the insistence to disregard dynamics in favor of being even more obnoxious fucksy is simply depressing.

“Navigate” was excellent until it completely failed to go anywhere. “Bruises” seems to have a cool opening riff for the sole purpose of not trying the listener's patience too much. “Lies” must have been written mid-concert, during the process of playing “Lies”. “Hometowns” appears to have been picked from a catalog of stock indie songs and yet is one of the album's highlights. “Close to Nowhere” is a totally useless but pleasant little thingy that should have been an interlude or something. Meanwhile, they stick to the simplest and most default song structure in the existence of rock music and still manage to fuck it up notoriously a couple of times. At least there are a few okay songs to even things out, and sometimes it actually sounds like they tried. I'd dare to even say that “You're Not Pretty but you Got it Going On” is great, and “Wanderluster” is not far behind. Then again, your neighbor's band also has its couple of good tunes, am I right or am I not so right?

As for the mindset that I assumed Band of Skulls follow on the first paragraph, you do only live once, so you should most definitely seize the day and do something important. And that implies not wasting time listening to the nth repetition of an underachieving chorus. I do just that so that you don't have to because, as you know, I have no life. This is a 2.5 out of 5 album, which means that you have no reason to listen to it to know how good or how bad music can get, and it's not even all that enjoyable. Stick to appreciating the album cover.

Standout tracks:
Sweet Sour
Wanderluster
You're Not Pretty But You Got it Going On
Hometowns

Wormeaten - Tortured Cadaveric Humanity

(PROTIP: if you're in a hurry, don't read my reviews; if you hate reading, like I do, skip the first two paragraphs and be amazed at the lack of context)

I think it's pretty obvious by now that Brutal Death Metal, and to some extent modern Death Metal in general, are pretty much completely detached from the original genre they spawned from. Sure, we have the “retro” kind of releases here and there, Rotten Death or The Dominant being gleaming examples *sarcastic cough for those not brain-dead enough to intentionally read my drivel*,  but they mostly seem to be just as pathetic as the 2nd generation Glam Metal bands that are actually 1st generation Glam Metal bands hiding behind an HD band pic and loudness war. The really important stuff, the kind that has more thought than fanboyism injected into its creative process, seems to have moved very far from the Sabbathian way that birthed it.

You won't hear a hail of melodies anymore. You won't hear one memorable riff supporting an entire song. You won't hear solos that stick to your unconscious and cause insomnia when you're reminded of them. Nowadays, you don't hear a powerful wail from the vocal cord person. You don't have the right for the comfort of knowing what the hell is going on. Malignancy, Mitochondrion, Ulcerate, Wormeaten and such are still definitely Death Something, just nothing resembling Metal, or even Rock, for that matter. If I had it my way, I'd actually have these bands be called Death Something and let the Bloodbaths and Tormenteds of the world stick to their precious suffix. I honestly don't mind, as long as, time and again, Something proves itself to be an absolutely fascinating genre and way of thinking.

Wormeaten are a Brutal Death Something band from Colombia. Now that we're familiar with the band we can move on to their album. Actually, no. I'm the lead procrastinator in the play “Endrey's Social Circle”, so let's properly impersonate the character by first dissecting the prefix behind Death Something that I employed two sentences and a few commas earlier (I won't dissect “Death” only because that's a perspective on what music should be and a perspective is a human thing, meaning that it's full of fallacies right to the core and then some, so dissecting it would make me sad). “Brutal” is absolutely not necessarily a specific sound, it's more of an intention. A method of delivery, if you will. What I mean by this is that Brutal music can come in any shape and style it wants, as long as it coincides with the original objective of straining and just overall messing with the mind of the listener, although having the snare sound be terrible helps. Even more than classical music, Brutal music outright forbids a casual listen from the get-go. The sloppy production, the confusing playing, the loudness, the chaotic composition, it's not accidental. It's not the aggression that makes the music Brutal, it's the listener's necessity to make sense of it. It ends up being a high effort / high reward system, so that's an addictive element ingrained here as well. To sum up, once you properly dig into Brutal Death Something, you don't get out.

Meanwhile, this band I'm supposedly reviewing is removing all the unnecessary noise, all the layers of residual Metal left behind, bit by bit, until the pure embodiment of this form of artistic expression I totally just pulled out of my ass is branded deep into the hippocampus. These guys are all that is subtle and misleading that comes with being Brutal. Beginning with the traditional shitty b-movie sample intro, Tortured Cadaveric Humanity lures the listener in with a relatively competent dose of BDS/M (contain your adolescence). Then, with each song, they alter their sound a bit, until by the last track we're left to savor the controlled and mechanical abstraction of the riffs and the pulsating quality brought on by the spastic songwriting. It's similar to having a manipulative acquaintance who with every calculated move dominates every aspect of your life and makes you their bitch. Anyone able to pull something so meticulous off in a musical form, even in the marginally half-assed manner we get here, is a genius.

Now allow me to explain what's half-assed about it. The first half is just pretty good, quite far from the holyfuckingshitthisisflawless-ness of the second. The songwriting ranges from absolute brilliant employment of micro-riffs and fills, not to mention some incredible skills in theme development, to some rather serious occasional structure and dynamic problems, lazy slam placement and a slight overall blocky feel in some of the tracks, particularly “Dismembered Victims”. Which is weird, considering that dynamics and slams are also the album's strongest points in other places. That tiny pause in “Rusty Chains And Claustrophobia” which then leads to the main riff gets me every time. And some of the riffs, wow, are they awesome, and some of the riffs, wow, are they just okay.

So what we get is an impression of what Wormeaten were seeking to do, which has to marinate for a long time before making sense, meanwhile there's “Dismembered Victims” and one misplaced riff in “Ground Human Flesh” ruining your day every time. Luckily, the experience just gets better and better, so there's an incentive to keep listening. And when you hear the breakdown at the end of “Internal Killer”, you know these guys have style. By the way, the BDS/M thing from earlier, it's Brutal Death Something / Metal, just in case you got amused.

Standout tracks:

Crying Cadaverine
Rusty Chains and Claustrophobia
Internal Killer
Wormeaten

 

Mooseifer - Welcome To Amnesia Street

I expect that a music fan will like a challenge, so I want you to imagine that you're in a band (PROTIP: for reference, use your band), and you make a song. You're quite proud of your song, proud enough to want to include it in a future album. Now, the twist is that you're in a prog band and it's the 70s, so the xylophone solo alone is a whopping 20 minutes long, and the rest is another 50. Unsurprisingly, you aren't able to fit that into one 25 minute LP side. And since the song was originally conceived as a 3:30 minute single, and then somehow extended itself, no one had actually considered the question of how the listeners were to hear it. Now you were pretty frustrated when that happened in your imagination, huh?

Then the thought came: “Hey, if it took us half the song's length in time to compose that 70 minute thing, being brilliant and all, we can probably make an album's worth of shorter songs before the release date of the original album”. A roar of weed-smelling unanimous agreement ensues, the guitarist plays Something, the vocalist mumbles a verse about swords and portals and dragons, and 10 minutes later, the album's done. It's hypothetically released a week later as a collection of accomplished 8-minute semi-epics and is hypothetically received to a rumble of praise and devotion. What the hypothetical people didn't notice back then was that while the tracks made sense individually, you couldn't really think of them as parts of a whole. In terms of flow, the album was a mess, but it didn't really matter. You only got to listen to the same music for up to 25 minutes without pause anyway.

Now fast-forward to 1985. Your band (let's give it a proggy name. How about Philosophorgy?) is seeing some surprisingly consistent success. You've headlined tours, signed autographs, become selective of your groupies, the lot. Meanwhile the CD format is beginning to gain traction. So, to celebrate, you decide to finally record and release that 70 minute song from when you guys started. You unleash your most ambitious creation to the world, and the world wishes you hadn't. Even your most die-hard fans consider this album a slip in quality. Yet you were using pretty much the same compositional method as always. What happened? Well, for one thing, the xylophone solo alone was a whopping 20 minutes long.

What I'm talking about here is album flow, macrodynamics, if you will. You have the opener, the closer, the stuff at the middle, and all that has to make sense together. Once the albums become longer, this becomes a more evident concern. You must be able to maintain a balance between variety and consistency, creativity and identity of the individual songs. And that's why Welcome To Amnesia Street should have been a shorter album: it has great tracks, but they're all way too alike. Wait, that's not really true. What happens is that we have a pretty acceptable amount of variety, but it's spread among an amount of time that would require about half a metric fuckload of variety, at least. Or maybe some sense of progression, another thing this release really lacks.

Anyway, I suppose it's as good a time as any to be late to explain the overall sound of what I'm reviewing, so here we go. Based on my ludicrously limited knowledge of electronic music, we have here an interesting and unusual take on ambient electronic with slightly atonal and mathematical characteristics. The production is extremely dry, not usual for something of this kind. And personally, I like it. Because after that initial horribly-synthetic-sound shock, it works in the same way that a health freak's perception lets them notice and memorize every single freckle on their body, as well as the date each one popped up. All in all, Mooseifer's work here is comparable to a creative expansion of what Trent Reznor would do in his slower stuff, minus vocals, plus a dose of hipster cred closing in on LD50.

Back to the flow thing from earlier. We begin and end the listen on a disappointing note (this disappointment implying the existence of potential for greatness), and spend the rest of the time randomly leaping from mental state to mental state, with song quality ranging anywhere from “incredible” to “someone describing their stamp collection”. If albums were people, this would be a totally normal person, and that is not a good thing for an album to be. It has a certain personality, certain characteristics, certain details: some boring, some fascinating, and it doesn't know why it got them and what to do with them. So the listener ends up being given separate but consistent ideas to pick the best from. I'm not saying that Welcome To Amnesia Street should have been released as 16 separate singles, just that it's 16 singles under one name.

Also, some of the tracks sound like different takes on the same principle, especially on the latter half. I'd rather there were only one track per principle. Yet idea consistency is more of a tool than a burden, meaning that the actual problem is rooted in composition method. It never devolves into “add layer to main beat (*infinity)”, Mooseifer being careful to add some tasty changes, transitions, interludes and the occasional chorus to spice things up, but it doesn't negate the possibility of that devolution happening. Atmosphere is the main focus here, an almost droningly constant atmosphere. Meaning that song structure is rarely used for anything beyond novel variety. Dynamics are mostly absent. One song even shows how horribly this technique can backfire, isn't that right, “Joined Together (By The Eyes)”?

So yeah, judging by the tone of my review, I suppose you've deduced that I didn't really develop much of an emotional bond with this release. That is totally true, but it doesn't mean I don't like it. For one thing, there is something inherently human about the endeavor that seems to lack in better produced music. For another thing, the layers and sounds chosen and atmospheres are unlike anything I've ever heard. Maybe that's because I haven't heard all that much anyway, but my impression is that, through a creative use of presets, Mooseifer managed to somehow extend beyond the horrid production and make that his thing. Not to mention that the rationed use of dynamics works miracles in some songs. Mostly “Clam City Evacuation”, though. Finally, it's the sense of discovery that you get from this sort of thing: obscure music that oozes of and revels in its own obscurity. Music that makes you realize both how many talented people there are out there and how much of an important role the listener has after all. As for Philosophorgy, I like their name and backstory you imagined a while ago. I think I'll start using your hypothetical prog band more often. Oh, and your 70 minute song sucked, by the way.

Standout tracks:

Mind Eggs
Clam City Evacuation
Calmer Gardai
Summoning The Whatsamajig
Mega Witch 3
Password Protected

Criterion - The Dominant

Rotten Tomatoes is rotten. It's slow and ad-ridden, it's colored after pus and infections, it has a database as tiny as the amount of fucks I give about how illegible my handwriting is, and its policy of basing scores on a number of “yays” and “nays” results in your total knowledge of the movie remaining the same. When I accidentally stumble into this horrid realm, I wonder what my life has come to. Not that it's all that bad, but when you're waiting weeks for a worthless page to load, it seems miserable. This waiting and disappointment have, though, the positive effect of giving way to introspection. You wonder about things, and you occasionally reach great conclusions. In this case, I wondered about the reason for this benign tumor, this negligible blood clot, to exist in the first place, and what I realized was this: it is a template. A template for programmers and web designers of exactly what they don't want their movie review website to become. A place to check on all the potential errors one might end up committing, reference on what to stray away from. This way, the only thing one needs to do to ensure the hypothetical website's success is to avoid making it resemble Rotten Tomatoes.

Now, let's return to one of the points mentioned earlier, the “yay” or “nay” system. The “x out of y (x <= y)” system is not much better. Even “yays and nays” can be interpreted as “x out of 1”. What happens is that even if the knowledge of how good the rated entity is becomes more exact depending on the value of y, the knowledge you gathered will still amount to only that, how good the rated entity is. You don't end up knowing how valuable it is as an existing fraction of the total knowledge and culture created up to that point in time, for instance. And there ought to be a rating for that, because it is not a direct correlation. So, for example, Rotten Tomatoes is horrible in terms of quality, but extremely important from a didactic perspective. As such, I think it was very brave of Criterion to make a Death Metal reinterpretation of Rotten Tomatoes.

No, really,  The Dominant makes Criterion sound like they're so aware of all the things that one is not supposed to do when making a good DM album that they just do every one of them out of boredom. They clearly strive for the “once great band trying to return to its glory days after a second reunion tour” sound. And despite this being a debut, this sound is so convincingly executed that you can almost see the band members crying themselves to sleep after screaming “It all made sense before!” at the top of their lungs for half an hour. Their work here is so generic that it has to have been done so intentionally. The album cover is lazy, the logo looks like it's been used so many times before that it's now completely devoid of meaning, what can be discerned from the lyrics is not worth discerning, and the song titles sound like band names (most probably because they are). As for the music, well, let me change the paragraph.

Have you ever heard an album where the production was absolutely bland and uninteresting, but simultaneously sounded somehow off? And have you ever heard an album where, encased in that frustrating dullness are riffs that have a spark of potential, muddled by said production? And have you ever heard an album where said riffs are encased, completely isolated from each other, in medleys that are supposed to pass for songs? I've explained that I believe this release to be comparable to Rotten Tomatoes: it's horrible, but worth the experience. Now, the last point I mentioned is exactly why I think this. The structures of the songs make me believe Criterion either have not listened to Death metal in a long time, or wrote The Dominant with the Wikipedia entry on Death Metal as their main influence. I get the feeling that Criterion don't really understand the concept of a song making sense. At all.

I actually compiled a list of the structures of all the songs, also stating my remarks in relation to said structures, but I really didn't need to do that to notice a pattern in the music here. Criterion seem to love making riffs pop out of nowhere. This technique can be used tastefully, obviously, but what they like to do afterwards is to forget how said riffs were originally meant to be tasteful surprises, and start working on the songs based on these one-time intrusions. They also like making these excellent ultra epic multi-section solos, and then plopping them wherever. There is one for almost every song, generally in the most awkward places. Meanwhile all the other usual structural elements are just scattered around aimlessly, and the listener is left to attempt to make sense of all that mess. The result is five unremarkable tracks and another four tracks competing for the title of “worst Death Metal song ever”.

”Blackened Memories” sounds like it's about to end for practically its entire runtime. “Last Breath” throws in a “climactic conclusion” solo before its first minute and overall sounds like someone accidentally spliced the two halves of the song the wrong way around. “Obliteration” stops making sense just as you realize that the solo is going for too damn long and you're only half way into the 3 minutes and 54 seconds indicated. Even the band eventually gave up on that track and decided to just slap a cheesy sample between the overlong middle and the ending and call it a day. Finally, “Demoniac Replacement” is just an intro, a normal chorus-verse-chorus after a devastating car crash, and the intro's younger sibling getting all solded together in some awkward incident and the three having to live with this predicament somehow.

All this happens while the guitars and drums do their best at repeating stuff that has been done umpteen times before. Occasionally, they'll mistakenly slip an interesting part here and there, and there's even a whole song that can be considered “good”. The vocalist is the best musician in this department. He's boring as hell. Period. He just drones on and off in the foreground. Nothing else. The album flows just like a random compilation of tracks, which are in turn a random compilation of riffs. No sense of order, no sense of progression. If it weren't for the sudden bouts of creativity in terms of riff writing, The Dominant would have been a perfect learning tool. “Wanna make a good Death Metal album? Now it's easy. All you have to do is not sound like us.”, Criterion could say. Still, this release is a fantastic achievement, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made earlier. I recommend people listen to this and endure it, and really try to delve into all its mistakes. Not very enjoyable, but certainly worth your time.

Standout tracks:

The Slayer
Awaken
Suffocation

On another note, I became 18 recently, so I'm officially within the appropriate age for being pretentious. So please allow me to make use of this opportunity to write like a total asshat this once without repercussions.

Anaal Nathrakh - Hell Is Empty, and All the Devils Are Here

I think that, in my lifetime so far, I've heard “Party Rock Anthem” way more than the zero times I intended to. When LMFAO comes on, I want to insert a Q-Tip deep enough into another person's ear to telekinetically perforate my own tympanic membranes. Still, my stupidity and hate for their music aren't enough for me to denounce them as terrible musicians. They are not. When music follows predictable patterns, it sends positive stimuli to the brain. So simplistic, dumb music is easier to enjoy on a biological level, which is in turn an easier alternative to thinking about it. It's hard to distinguish the fun in standing motionless whilst rubbing your chin, and LMFAO are aware of that. They know what they're doing and they do it effectively.

This seemingly unrelated prologue is actually pretty fitting in the context of this review, because Anaal Nathrakh are pretty much the LMFAO of metal, as far as this album is concerned. It's a shame, really. I was feeling like talking about stuff like creative arrangements, songwriting, structure and whatnot, but none of those are worth mentioning here. This is a party metal album and every one of its components equates to that. Well, obviously the party itself would have to be kind of ridiculous and unusual for the analogy to make sense, but that's just a detail. Anyway, the sound on HIEaAtDAH is huge and filthy, in the sense that you can feel the mucus leaking out of the speakers when you play it. The music is as loud as the hype around this album and as simplistic as dignity would allow it to be. I almost forgot, in case you didn't know or didn't deduce by the liberal use of “A”s and “H”s in their name, Anaal Nathrakh is a black metal band. But, in accordance to the party paradigm, their music has been streamlined in order to follow the biological feedback principle mentioned earlier. This, in turn, means that their method of composition and riffing is slicker, neater, with a lot of grind influences for added energy.

I must also point out their inherent fixation for appropriately neat song structures. You have here hooks and yell-gibberish-along choruses by the dozen per track. The songs are so easy to follow that you'd need to be holding 58 conversations simultaneously to even show signs of zoning out. That is a good thing if you want to flex your social life to a soundtrack, but not so good if you want to listen to music. If you want to listen to Hell Is Empty... seriously, prepare to be distracted by how fascinating the floor is. In fact, the only thing that appears to differentiate the music here from the textbook definition of “generic” is the relentless playing around in the vocal department. It sounds like V.I.T.R.I.O.L. wouldn't come to the recording sessions, so they'd hide a microphone in his bathroom whenever he took a bath. Only occasionally are there indicators that the two band members even know each other. Most of the time you have a tube with vocal cords doing whatever tickles its fancy pasted on top of an average extreme pop metal act being mechanical and boring and shit.

You've probably deduced by now that I don't buy into all the murmur surrounding this album that compares it to some of the most evil sounding music ever created. Well, that's not exactly true either. Think of an ADD-ridden Rammstein, where the lineup is just the keyboardist cloned six times. That's how evil the album is for the most part. But, just like any party should, things become more interesting toward the second half. What we have here is the most awesome and most disappointingly short party to have ever existed. During “Solifugae”, all the people are entering the party. The second track serves as a way to warm the crowd up. There are songs down the middle that merely serve the two purposes of being fist pumpers and of including as many metal clichés as humanly possible. Tracks 7 to 9 see the party showing more and more hints of being kind of strange. “Sanction Extremis” is the party becoming too weird to handle and people starting to try to leave through the now bolted shut doors. And finally “Castigation and Betrayal”, as the name implies, would be someone having called the police in the previous song and the mentioned authoritative entity performing a pooping manoeuvre on the festivities. As such, Hell Is Empty... is that kind of album that will not contribute in any way to humanity. Don't listen to it because you think it will be captivating or enlightening. It isn't. But if you want a dose of mindless fun, be my guest.

Standout tracks:

The Final Absolution
Lama Sabachthani
Sanction Extremis (Kill Them All)

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