Review by Saxy S for Ulcerate - Stare Into Death and Be Still (2020)

As most of you know, I have never been truly appreciative or gripped by the technical side of death metal. I have always viewed it as an excuse for bands to play really fast, without any song structure or composition, to go along with some pretty terrible production that ramps up the volume to eleven without justification.

So I was a little nervous checking out Ulcerate and their new album, Stare Into Death and Be Still. I was told to start out by listening to heir very successful 2009 album, Everything Is Fire before embracing this. And I was intrigued. It was still tech death, but not in the traditional sense of the word. For one, it was pretty melodic, and the production didn't sound like ass. But the album was held back by its songwriting.

So it's been over ten years since that album and what has Ulcerate delivered here? A pretty sweet sounding tech death record where the post-metal elements that were only fragmented before, are highlighted with more frequency, even if I can say that this is certainly not my forte.

For starters, the production on this record is spot on. The percussion sounds tasteful and not like a brick wall of sound, drowning out everything that may come in its way with abrasive trigger bass drum. There are slower, atmospheric sections in which the guitar leads have plenty of room to breathe, which are complemented by pummeling heavier sections with some insane drum work from Jamie Saint Merat. The vocals are big and soaring and match with the instrumental palette very well. I think the bass could be more present throughout the entire record, as it could have made some of these tracks much more open and free.

Which does lead me to my biggest issue with this album: the songwriting. While the fine line between progressive metal and technical death metal is very thin, this is still a progressive metal album at heart. And it suffers from many of my quibbles that I have had with modern progressive bands in the past. Specifically, tracks that sound like long form collections of ideas rather than having a universal connector. As a result, tunes that started off with a lot of promise ("The Lifeless Advance", "Drawn Into The Next Void", etc.) lose steam about halfway through and seem to just end without any resolution.

This doesn't make Stare Into Death and Be Still a bad record. The pure sound of this record is some of the best produced and sonically pleasing technical death albums I've heard in quite some time. But if Ulcerate could include some inter-connectivity in these tracks, they could be something truly special. As it is, they are still teetering on the cusp of greatness.