Reviews list for Ulcerate - Everything Is Fire (2009)

I'm concluding my adventure for the Horde writing a line that I fear I've written too many times, but it still stands.

Technical Death metal-The musicianship is inarguably fantastic. It's just a shame that there aren't any songs. It plays like a collection of very technical practice exercises thrown together, and there was a point in time when I was younger that I probably would have been into it, but I'm older now, and I've heard people play fast and technical. I've heard it so much that the novelty has worn off, and this album has nothing else to offer.

When I finally returned to the metal scene back in 2009 after a decade immersing myself in electronic music, I was very keen to see what my beloved death metal genre had evolved into. The late 90’s had seen my interest gradually starting to wane as death metal’s reign at the top of the extreme metal bubble had gradually started to burst however this hadn’t eroded my passion for the classics in the slightest so my curiosity was still high & I progressed into a period of frantic binging. Amongst the litter of pretenders & copy-cats, I stumbled upon the brand new sophomore album from New Zealand three-piece Ulcerate & was fascinated as to how a band from such a small & relatively local country had seemingly created such a buzz in the underground scene so I went into my first listen with an open mind & few expectations.

The first listen of a record like “Everything Is Fire” can be very challenging, even for the most hardened death metal fanatic. It’s an extremely inaccessible release & requires a level of patience to fully grasp. The first thing that hits you is the sheer density of the sound you’re presented with & it’s hard to believe the sonic assault you’re experiencing has come for just the three dudes. In fact, I’d be very surprised if most fans didn’t find their first run through the album to simply wash over them with very little actually sticking as the listener struggles to find something familiar to grab on to & that was very much the case with me. It was only on subsequent listens that the individual tracks started to open up & I began to realise why I’d struggled so much with it on first listen.

You see, “Everything Is Fire” is an extremely complex record. The level of technical skill required to create this music is astonishing. In fact, it’s so ambitious from a compositional & structural point of view that it often becomes its own worst enemy with its weakest moments proving to simply have too much going on for the listener’s brain to take it all in. It’s almost like the band members had too many ideas & tried to stuff them all into the shortest possible period of time. On some occasions this can come across as sheer genius while at others it becomes overpowering & sees the whole structure of the song-writing starting to break down. Thankfully though, the atmosphere that’s created has a darkness & a vitality that ooze of an elite class artist & this was enough to see me holding the album in high regard & placing it on high rotation for several weeks as I valiantly attempted to understand what was being presented to me.

As I would later discover, Ulcerate had begun life as a fairly generic technical/brutal death metal band & despite finding their 2004 “The Coming Of Genocide” demo to be much closer to my musical roots, I also found it to be pretty boring overall. Things would start to take shape with their 2007 debut album “Of Fracture & Failure” which kept me engaged with a little more ambition thrown into their sound however the stop/start nature of the song-structures made it sound a touch messy so it didn’t hold all that much replay value for me. Things would change drastically in the two years that followed though as “Everything Is Fire” is a very different beast & is very much the release that represents Ulcerate's coming of age. This time the band had harnessed the dissonant & chaotic brand of tech death that Canadian legends Gorguts had created earlier in the 2000’s but had combined it with the dark atmosphere of Immolation & some wonderfully engaging post-sludge influences that sound similar to Neurosis. So it’s essentially a concoction of a few of my very favourite sounds, all thrown into a blender & presented in a classy & refreshing way. That’s not to say that it’s all a resounding success though as the tendency to descend into overly complex muck is still occasionally at play here however every track has enough musical genius to comfortably transcend those obstacles.

It’s worth mentioning that the highlight of any Ulcerate record is most certainly drummer Jamie Saint Merat & “Everything Is Fire” is no exception in that regard, despite him  surpassing even these obscene levels of proficiency on subsequent releases Jamie's quite simply the most astoundingly talented drummer that I’ve ever witnessed in metal music & that includes all of the big names. In fact, when I saw Ulcerate live I found that I could happily have stood & stared at him playing completely solo for hours on end, such was the impression his incredible technique left on me. On this occasion, the clicky kick drum sound doesn’t do him any favours as it tends to highlight even the slightest blemish in a lightning-fast double kick run & that’s certainly not evident on subsequent releases however the sheer power & precision on display is mind-blowing. It’s really pretty easy to let Jamie’s performance overshadow the rest of the band but once you get comfortable with that element you’ll notice that the angular & twisting guitar work of Michael Hoggard is quite spectacular too & is further accentuated by an excellent tone that highlights every nuance whilst losing none of its menace. The use of more atmospheric post-metal sections is a master stroke &, despite all of the dazzling technical histrionics, I tend to find myself enjoying these parts as much as anything else on the album. In fact, it’s the two extreme ends of the Ulcerate sound that give me the most pleasure i.e. the sludgy, downtempo & wonderfully professional post-metal excursions & the more straight forward blasting parts. When they stick to those two extremes I find that everything comes together more consistently than it does when they’re trying to set new records for the amount of riffs they can cram into a few bars. Bassist Paul Kelland’s vocal performance reeks of Immolation’s Ross Dolan & tends to be pretty monotonous but that’s not such a bad thing within the context of Ulcerate’s sound as he provides some much needed consistency within all the chaos. This works better in the studio than it does live where he tends to sound a little samey.

To be honest, it took me years to fully grasp “Everything Is Fire” & for that reason I placed it behind each subsequent Ulcerate release which saw them further refining their sound to make it a more cohesive & generally palatable experience. I think that opening the album with the messiest & least impressive track in “Drown Within” probably wasn’t the wisest move either however spending some time apart has a tendency to see me going in with fresh ears & it’s resulted in me discovering the true genius in this album. It’s certainly not a perfect death metal record but there’s a wonderful consistency to the tracklisting & the overall class & ambition of the performances is a step up from 99% of their peers. What’s equally impressive is that the band have handled the production, engineering, mixing, mastering, artwork & layout entirely themselves so it’s a complete piece of art that’s the truest representation of what the band were trying to achieve. There’s definitely a case for saying that I really WANTED to love this record & perhaps that’s left me open to liking it more than I may otherwise have but I’m not sure that this matters in the grand scheme of things. Ulcerate may well have surpassed this supposed crowning achievement in their extremely solid back catalogue however this will always be an astoundingly dark & ambitious technical death metal release that will continue to bend my mind in unusual & uncomfortable ways for many years to come yet.

For fans of Gorguts, Baring Teeth & Artificial Brain.

It is no secret that I love me some Ulcerate. They enjoy that rarefied space in my estimation whereby I hold them in such high esteem that I would buy anything they put out without hearing it first. Like Gorguts and Immolation, Ulcerate have more than earned their props over the years and despite being the youngest of the three bands, possess a maturity that belies their years.

However, everybody must start somewhere and nobody in my top three has a flawless discography. Whilst Everything Is Fire is by no means perfect, it is an accomplished piece of technical/avant-garde death metal. We must consider that this was the New Zealander’s third record in seven years, with the previous two outings being good (if not particularly fully developed) foundation stones to build from. Listening to a bands discography in the wrong order is difficult though, especially when you consider their latter output – which I heard first - to be their best. In listening to pretty much anything before Vermis I am constantly having to remind myself that the best was yet to come and in doing so ensure that I am focused on rating output from before 2013 as being more formative releases.

It is fair to say that Everything is Fire exhibits all the technical capability we know and love from the band. At this stage in their career, they were by no means the finished article, yet at the same time they were pushing boundaries and trying new things. Whilst these do not always work (parts of the album do just sound like jumbled bashing and crashing) the overall structure is in place, albeit minus some of the finer detail I am more accustomed to with their later material.

Those trademark dissonant and mining riffs are fully present and accounted for. On a track like The Earth at Its Knees, this discordancy really thrives. My main criticism of the guitar is that it does feel removed at times from what is going on. Avant-garde tendencies aside (yes, I know this shit is not supposed to be linear) there is a real sense of disconnection in places between the guitar and the rhythm section. When they get it right (We Are Nil, Caecus, Tyranny and The Earth at Its Knees) they smash it out of the park. Saint Merat’s exquisite drumming shores up a lot of my dissatisfaction with Everything is Fire. At times on Stare Into Death and Be Still he seemed to cross into some other-worldly ability to concoct some of the most off-kilter yet utterly enthralling drum patterns. On this album he is by far the most advanced participant, with a skill set that perhaps is the reason why I get the sense that the rest of the group are playing catch-up. He is the engine behind all that happens here and in all honesty this album would just not work without him.

This album initially received an unfair three stars from me originally, which is particularly harsh as despite the above highlighted challenges this album is worthy of more. Revisiting it this time around has convinced me that there is enough identifiable quality here to link this to the wider discography that followed. Yes, I still believe they only hit their truly magical levels of cohesion on Vermis and have not looked back since, but I cannot think that many other bands in 2009 could deliver anything near the quality of Everything is Fire. I do not recall at this stage just how far they advanced themselves on Destroyers of All some two years on from this release (guess that is my next revisit that is required). If you are new to Ulcerate this would be the perfect place to start to truly chart the growth of one of metal’s finest avant-garde death metal outfits.