Rexorcist's Reviews

I've been putting off these guys for forever and I don't know why.  Maybe it's because I'm not really into alternative metal or related genres like multiple.  Now I've always liked Bat Country ever since I heard it on SSX On Tour for Gamecube, and it was one of many songs I kept on the custom playlist with classics like Stand Up and Shout by Dio, Dynamite by Scorpions and Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden.  There were others, but I quickly associated myself with the song.

I understand that the band is a very flavorful one, and has reinvented themselves multiple times, even after just one or two albums.  As an Arctic Monkeys and Led Zeppelin fan, I have absolutely no problem with this.  In fact, from what I understand, these guys are supposed to have sucked as a metalcore band, so in my curiosity I'll likely get through all of their albums soon.  But despite the fact that I've put them off for far too long (Bilbo Baggins, 2001), the biggest reason I'm checking them out right now is so I can have an opinion on them.  This was likely influenced not only by my recent curiosity pertaining to their other songs and the knowledge of their diverse history, but out of a Reddit conversation involving the qualifications of a metal band on Metallum.  So I'm gonna check them out from the start.

The somewhat symphonic and cinematic intro is nice, but as soon as these guys dig right into the metalcore, they lose all sense of atmospheric building, and stem into a random and yet surprisingly predictable and tropy metalcore band.  I really did NOT like "Turn the Other Way."  Its lack of organization was so amateurish that it might as well have stemmed from a poorly-recorded black metal pre-debut album garage demo.  There are only slight improvements over the next two songs, with a welcome edition of the Bad Religion-style melodic skate sound making its way into a little bit of The Art of Subconscious Illusion with the unpredictability feeling a little more organized, almost like a metalcore variant of NoMeansNo, not that they hold a candle to NoMeansNo, who are probably the greatest hardcore band on Earth.  It even gets pretty creepy near the end, which I have to appreciate for a band who just named themselves Avenged Sevenfold at the time.  But immediately after, the album gets samey, and the tropes just take turns with no direction other than to display the popular tropes, which means the real reason the last track worked was simply because it was a better variant of an otherwise chaotic mess all restricting itself into one genre.

It gets to the point where the piano rock song Warmness of the Soul is a breath of fresh air as opposed to a sore thumb situation because its simple and catchy sound is like a pillow in comparison to the tiring metalcore tropes.  And the album practically stays that way until we get their attempt at a Stairway to Heaven of their own with it going into softer melodic territory before going back into edgy metalcore tropes.  This means that the album only proves that Avenged Sevenfold had not grapsed creativity yet and tried to take an easy way into metal fame.  Obviously, it didn't work out yet.

Six years later, right?  Seems a bit long to wait for another Judas Priest album after they've had a SECOND comeback.  But maybe that length was taken for the band to really hone their skills again and try to improve.  If that's the case, they succeeded, because their new album is some purified metal with a nostalgic feel that also acts as a step forward from the overly-80's Firepower, being its own thing and having been seen as the next essential in the Priest catalog.

I was totally taken by surprise with those totally-synthed up Def Leppard drums and guitar sounds for the intro, which eventually becomes a flat-out power metal song on par with the works of Gamma Ray.  Halford's voice and the backing voices work together with a pure and shining harmony that to me is like a metal version of Simon and Garfunkel.  Halford's gotten a stronger hold on his voice, which can be clearly heard on this album, even while the production assaults you with a wild range of metal noises and effects.  Two songs in and this is already a huge improvement over Firepower.  Of course, by the time the title-track came along, I was afraid the album was going to be quite samey, which is something that Firepower largely avoided until the last third, as it was too long of an album not to fall victim to it.  Thankfully, the title track had levels of metal energy that rival the Arrange Edition of the F-Zero X soundtrack.

The entire first half was a bit samey with difference largely just going to the tempos, so whatever weirdness came from the intro wasn't going to be common.  Thankfully, side B starts with a ballad: Crown of Horns, so there change in pace is powerful without damaging the flow, as this song is quite a good ballad that shows that Halford still has vocal range.  And despite its ballad status, this doesn't stop the instrumentation from being thick and featuring a dense metal atmosphere.  Of course, the album goes right back into thrash territory immediately afterwards, but this is still good because nothing on Side A was as heavy lightning-speed-driven as the song As God as My Witness.  So I interpret this as the album doing two new things on Side B to compensate for a samey side A.  This sounds familiar: Hounds of Love? Trial By Fire even experiments with the rhythm some while teetering on the balance between heavy metal and metal ballad.  So By this point I'm fine with another song sounding like something from the first half.  The tunes take a little of a drop in rhythmic quality once they go back to the normality of the first half, but are still enjoyable.

Invincible Shield shows a noticeable improvement over Firepower and is a greater testament to what Judas Priest is capable of.  Through denser metal atmospheres and instrumentation, as well as a willingness to push even further than Painkiller, Invincible Shield overcome the 80's nostalgic vibe that could be interpreted as "being done before," and stands as a modern classic.

Judas Priest were lighter than what metal should be interpreted as for many of their early albums, and that all chanced with the surprise comeback album Painkiller, which perfected the metal tropes that the same band's earlier albums helped to influence.  They had steered into Metal Church and Metallica territory and reinvented themselves.  Unfortunately, nobody liked what came after that until almost 30 years later, when these 70-year-olds put out Firepower, their second comeback album.  Now Judas Priest are once again the talk of the metal world.  However, does this even come close to Painkiller?

As far as attacking the entire heavy metal genre goes, most of these songs are exercises in one or another typical stle of heavy metal.  The album dives into speed, power, thrash and even arena rock territory without ever fully crossing those borders, allowing Judas Priest to both stay true to their Painkiller sound while addressing the variety of the genre they influenced.  And boy, does this trope fest give you ALL the goods.  Each melody and riff is quite catchy and packed with energy that almost reaches Painkiller heights.  Right from the get-go, you know what your getting as its opening title track punches you in the face with its own energy.  And even though it's obvious that Halford's voice aged, he's still able to hold the metallic sound of it very well, perfectly fitting into Priest's style yet again.  And lyrically, the album's loaded with all the metal themes of the classic age: the warnings against Satanism and the horror stories that come from it, the machine guns blasting over the battlefield, comparing your sex appeal to weather like you're suddenly a Norse god, etc. etc.  And these lyrics are all pretty good and easy to sing along with.

So basically, you kind of have to say that this is the kind of album that's been done before, not only by Priest before but by other bands.  I occasionally even got a WASP feel.  The real clincher here is that none of these tropes are poorly delivered.  So the fact that these guys can stay this good after a series of failures between Painkiller and this shows that they're becoming more aware of what they must be, and it looks like the success stemming from their awareness carries on into Invincible Shield.  Firepower is one of the most spirited metal albums of the 2010's.  If you don't like heavy metal at all, you might find this generic.  If you do, you really should check this out.  If it was released around the time British Steel was, it would be one of their original classics.  On the other hand, you could say it bears a strong nostalgic touch thanks to its spirit, as is the justification for "pizza thrash,"  I mean, let's be honest.  Priest weren't quite this metallic and loud in the 80's, and this sounds just like an 80's album by another band that was heavier at the time, so the weird thing is that while this is a generic but good album, it's also an album that the band HASN'T DONE BEFORE. 

I remember checking out Convulsing a while back to get myself some more black death metal under my belt.  Their debut Errata was a pretty good one which didn't really say anything good or bad about their future, but their second album was a vast improvement which told me there was a good possibility the third ones gonna be a modern classic.  Was I gonna be right and this would be one of the better death albums of the decade, or was that hope false?

I had just finished the Hoplites catalog before hearing this, so I already had an example of a brilliant extreme metal atmosphere to compare this to.  I found that while the atmosphere of the whole album was deceit and effective, it still felt pretty standard.  It's like watching a sci-fi horror movie about a weird creature attacking a ship or a base.  These might be good movies if Alien didn't exist.  But the compositions had definite promise.  Among the technicality of it all is an eternal mix of anger and sadness that remains convincing all the way up to the Porcupine Tree cover at the end.  

I'm glad the Convulsing release a third album early this year, and it's worth listening to if you're a fan of the band, but there's hardly a difference between this album and the debut.  So I'm gonna give this tertiary release a bare minimum rating for four stars: 75.

I finally got through the previous albums of the Hoplites catalog, all so I can get to the one black metal album of 2024 that RYM seems to absolutely love.  I've been watching the 2024 charts for a while but haven't gotten around to this album yet.  I was focusing on other genres for a while and needed some more albums of different genres in my top 1000 albums.  See, the reason for that is because I was afraid of having too much metal there, and that this album might make it considering how much everyone loves it.  Since I have room for it now, I'm gonna give it a shot.

Instead of the three-to-seven minute energetic busts that we got on the last three albums, Hoplites surprises us with an evershifting avant-garde mess that's not only the most extreme album he's done so far, but is one of his most shifting and intriguing, going from one place to another at rapid pace without breaking the flow.  This is perfect for him since previous efforts have been very repetitive.  Our opening track has some saxophone at the beginning and end providing an extra backdrop for the insanity, for example.  No matter what's going on, the album is constantly going for over-composed insanity on epic scales.

Unfortunately, even though the songs do a lot, the emotional tone and end result of each song is ONCE AGAIN exactly the same.  You'd think with Hoplites' love of molding genres he'd have grown past that by now.  A five-star artist should be able to do multiple kinds of emotional cores if he's going to work with multiple sounds.  It's like the guy only really likes one type of song.  There's a lot of imagination in this album and that ONE THING gets in the way.  Sure, there are a couple of jazzy moments, and we can pretty much say that track 5 is a metalcore song, which is a little different, so there's that.

So despite that one flaw still being present, it's safe to say that Hoplites has made another improvement, and is now steering into Frank Zappa levels of experimental absurdity with overpowering effect.  This is music for those who love extreme music and for those who love extremities in general.  It's no wonder this is one of the highest rated metal albums of 2023.  This is imagination that almost breaks new ground for metal. 

By this point, Chinese black metal act Liu Zhenyang, or Hoplites, has tried a lot of different sounds with the same emotional core at the front of them.  Blackened death and dissonant death were the first two, having been featured on his first album as Hoplites, and on the second album he went with a punkier and thrashier atmosphere to bring out the energy and attitude from his powerful and noisy sound.  This third album, Antitimoroumeni, brings out the most of his experimentation and delivers a fully-fleshed Hoplites sound that keeps surprising you.

It must be noted that these songs can be very repetitive, relying on a repeating beat of a few notes with slight variations in the background much like an EDM album.  But the progression that appears in the foreground takes some drastic and sometimes instant turns that flow very well by both staying true to the vibe and fucking your head with is drastic measures and shifts.  Within these repetitive songs are a number of influences across the metal spectrum that have been dying to go together for ages: black, thrash, prog, core, avant-garde and death.  Even though it has a completely different sound that my ideal extreme album, the collective is exactly the kind of extreme album I would make.  This is the kind of album where batshit insanity like Schattousa goes perfectly with simpler punkish rampages like He tes ubreos aggelos, which are paired next to each other.  I would even go as far as to say that among these good and great tracks, Anti Theon is a work of sheer brilliance.

Hoplites really upped his game again with this release.  It has all the insanity of a good Deathspell Omega album but with a great genre range, despite the repetitiveness that plagues some of the tracks.  But I can see why Hoplites is making a name for himself on RYM (sadly the same is not true on Metalstorm or Metallum): he's one of the more inventive black metal acts we currently have.  This third studio album is a real testament to his abilities and a redefining album for his future.

Liu Zhenyang takes a new turn with this third project under the name Hoplites, having steered away from the death metal aspects of his previous two efforts and has now gone into crossover territory.  On this album, we have some distinct and powerful levels of blackcore that comntinue to use Zhenyang's excellent sense of crystal-clear production bringing out the best of noisy guitars.  You can hear everything perfectly in this extremely clean and never too-polished production, no matter what rapid pace the beat takes.  There is a punkish feel about it as elements of tech thrash, crossover thrash, metalcore and mathcore find their way in different places.  This sometimes makes certain songs feel shorter than they really are.  I was amazed that the fifth track was four minutes when it felt like two and a half minutes.  Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of variation that can be found in the emotional tone of the album, which was also a problem for the previous album, so while these songs are cool and have strong merits, don't expect the imagination that acts like Burzum and Emperor have achieved.  Still, I'm glad we have a black metal album willing to steer into thrashier and corier territory.  Strangely enough, the thrash aspects do more for the aggression than the dissonant death did on the debut album.  This gives songs like Hektropa a power that overtakes the senses.  So overall, thanks to an improved tone and aggression, this album is a fair improvement over the first album.

Two years after the release of an underwhelming extended play, Liu Zhenyang as Hoplites produces the first studio album under that name, and shows a dramatic improvement that pretty much cements him as an inventive and worthwhile black death artist.  In the short 37 minutes are a bunch of interesting compositions that fit a perfect balance between black and death, and making some room for experimentation with the tempos and structures, oftentimes being quite intriguing.  The one thing about the album that's mastered is the atmosphere.  There's an excellent level of brutality and aggression that any aspiring extreme metal artist needs to get right, proving that Zhenyang was fully aware of the mistakes of the EP.  It's exceptionally noisy and crystal clear at the same time.  My problem with the album is that despite all it's trying to achieve, all of the songs pretty much have the same tone of guitars and emotional core, meaning that the songs aren't as varied as the diversified genre-tagging would have you believe.  Otherwise, this is a fun 38 minutes and it makes me eager to see how much more Hoplites will improve.

So Hoplites, also known as Liu Zhenyang, is supposed to be a modern legend in the black metal and death metal worlds, right?  Well, not every legend starts out that way.  Ignoring his other aliases, this early Hoplites EP doesn't do his legend any favors.  My battle plan for attacking his discography was to go from start to finish, ending it with the 2024 album RYM loves.  This, however, is nothing but the most generic kind of black death you can find.  The audio quality is very poor, damaging the overall brutality of an otherwise brutal sound to the point that it loses its kick, and each of these songs pretty much sound exactly the same now matter how different the track times get.  OK, there are some decent compositions and fairly proggy moments, but I've heard all of those before.  Really, this isn't an album you should check out unless you're a fan of the Hoplites studio albums and you're curious.

Summoning's Stronghold is one of the very first atmo-black metal albums I had ever heard, and I think it was my first symphonic black album.  At the time I was absolutely astounded with what I has heard for the first time, altough now I give Emperor the lead in symphonic black metal, and black metal in general.  Stronghold had been near the top of my black metals list for a long time because it's a perfect album for nerds who want to be serious metalheads.  You really can't mock Stronghold for any fantasy cheese since it's such a serious and atmospheric album.

Stronghold builds itself on many of the best compositions that the band had thought of up to that point.  It was their fourth album, and their previous two already proved that they had merit and a good niche market that appealed to both metalheads and dungeon synth fans, continuing Emperor's schtick with an LOTR theme.  But this the the album where they fully fleshed it out and made the most of their atmospheric and melodic capabilities.  Sure, the album doesn't boast the kind of variety that got so many to love Burzum's Filosofem (a problem they would remedy on the next album, Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame), but this album is all about strong, perfect and sometimes frightening atmospheres.  The ghosts of the elves are wailing in a low requiem mass as the synths and blackened guitars join forces with a slow pace backed up by a clever drummer who adds his own epic layer to each song.  I guess if I had to pick a favorite song from this album, it would be "Where Hope and Daylight Die."

This is one of the best LOTR albums you're going to find.  The same epica and adventure is told through a powerful black atmosphere that will suck you directly into Middle-Earth, even if you're the type of metalhead that can't stand cheese.  Summoning might not be as innovative in symphonic black as Emperor, but they're essential to the genre largely for this album, and I agree with its cult status.

Synthesizers in metal used to be an unholy taboo among fans of unholy music, a never do in a world where you do things that aren't supposed to be done.  As far as metalheads went, synths in metal made Ed and Al's human transmutation forgivable.  That all changed when Emperor said "well fuck you" to the metalheads who scremed about this taboo.  Because of them, synths in music are a kep component to black metal diversity and has spawned its own non-metal genre that's very popular among metalheads: dungeon synth.  Mortiis left Emperor to focus on his electronica, and thanks to that we now have bands molding the two together, and one of the most important bands in this scene is one of the most LOTR-influenced bands on Earth: Summoning.

Summoning made a name for themselves with their second-through-fourth albums, which the latter of these three, Stronghold, being their most beloved.  But they pretty much did the same thing until Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame came along.  This is an album that relies less on the atmo-black-metal ambiance and more on the fantasy vibes that dungeon synth exudes, essentially being a dungeon synth album in its own right, as opposed to allowing these synths to be a simple atmospheric backdrop like on previous Summoning albums.  This allows the album to take pride in the switch between pure dungeon synth, folksy fantasy, heavy black metal and lighter atmo-black.  There's a progression here that the other albums didn't have, almost comparable to the early works of Moody Blues in how often the shifts came.  And thankfully, the LOTR themes and presences are not only lived up to, but connect all of these genres together.  Although, the actual compositions themselves are not always at peak performance.  The songs are all good, but there's only occasional brilliance here, leaving the vibes and diversity to try and make up for the fluctuation in melodic quality.

If you're a metalhead looking to get into dungeon synth, or vise-versa, I can't think of a better album to start with than Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame.  This is a pure fantasy album that takes itself seriously while giving into fantasy cheese.

Gojira seem to have achieved legendary status among metalheads for their innovations in the death metal scene, innovations which I can't fully deny.  Gojira really did something easy to get behind with From Mars to Sirius.  They captured the essence of the many genres that influenced the whole album throughout.  The industrial simplicity and grooves that come from these almost djenty progressive structures flow together brilliantly with a metallic aesthetic that's deep, rough and used the edge factor to max effect without going into the kind of over-edgy nu metal territory that a lot of people like to call butt-rock.  This kind of unique behavior can almost be compared to Dream Theater's artistic inclusion of 80's rock sounds in their brand of prog metal, or even Athiest's wild jazz influence.  This range of influences also allows for slight variations in aesthetics to give most of the songs their own identity.  Still, I have only one complain about this album.  I feel like the evolutions of each song weren't fully lived up to, likely because the progginess, while still good, have been outperformed earlier prog metal bands, so it's not the best prog death I've ever heard.  But it's still a really cool album with a lot of strong merits, and I won't complain about its popularity.  I feel like Gojira are a staple for what to do right when you have multiple interest and influences that you want to put in one project.

Cabinet, also known as Sxuperion since 2014 and member of Oreamnos since 2023, is garnering favor among underground metal fans as one of the most unsettling metal musicians of all time due to a perfectly healthy sense of texture.  His album Claustrophobic Dysentery is my current pick for the best war metal album of all time for its masterful use of noise and ambient as frightening textural instruments while the black and death metal guitars reached extremities unheard of before.  I wasn't going to listen to a lot of metal albums for a while sine I want to get some more albums of other genres in my top 1000, but for Cabinet I will maliciously and gleefully break that rule like a Kitkat bar.

On "Masticated Inurnment of Dysphagiactic Soils," We start with an oddly dissonant death take on black noise which intentionally varies in production quality going from too noisy to proper to totally atmospheric, and we see the shifts just like this through the entire album.  it's like a fucking Neurosis track.  This is the typical genre-shifting behavior I expect from Cabinet, but they're clearly more focused on the black noise atmosphere taking a stronger, fuzzier charge than what was seen on previous albums.  The four minutes here masterfully shift from one place to another, while its noise also creates an industrial atmosphere that gives it an almost science fiction approach.  The way I see it, this has to be classified as an avant-garde metal album, as its experimentation is heavy and unrelenting.  Just listen to track 9, Worms Squirming Into Your Occiput / Turning To Mush, and tell me this does not qualify as an experimental album.

For the best example, the title track shows no hesitation in delivering weird and wild collections of black noise and dark ambient teaming together to create unsettling Blut Aus Nord style atmospheres.  This is the slowest track so far, and definitely the most disturbing, as there is less of a mechanic feel to it and is more traditional in the vein of general extreme metal.  This welcome addition to both the diversity and flow of this ever so unpredictable with a singular strong persence throughout really displays Cabinet's unwavering willingness to fuck around and just creep you out to the point of vomiting.

Some of these songs, however, are pure experiments in texture.  While these two minute songs will be packed with shifts from one general sound to another, these songs still feel too short in the end, especially since four of these songs take up the entire middle section.  This is a similar criticism I give to several songs on Low by David freakin' Bowie.  Although, the progression of these songs was nice, and almost akin to the variety of the so-called "melody" that took up much of side B of Abbey Road.  The nature recordings at the end of track 7 were especially welcome.  Even within the two minute songs, we never know what robotic or ghostly sirens will overtake any noisy, industrial guitar rhythms or when the next tidal wave of pure black noise will assault us.  However, it should be said that, while "Worms Squirming Into Your Occiput / Turning To Mush" is a fine example of this experimentation, its second half is too long and a little unwelcome.

Well, I'm once again very happy with the direction Cabinet took.  I've been eagerly awaiting another Cabinet ever since I discovered them, and I was hoping this would end up just as experimental as ever.  This is a finer example of what trying to be creative with an otherwise lacking genre can do.  Bestial black metal needs more bands like Cabinet, and along with Claustrophobic Dysentery, this is proof.  Even though this album has some flaws stemming from lengths, this is a weird and unique black metal album and one that I highly recommend.

Having been completely taken in with Communion, I had to check out more Septicflesh as quickly as possible.  It's rare that I find a metal band that makes a point of variety.  Even though many claim that Communion was their high point, I wanted to make that call for myself.  I might end up on a death metal kick, so I have to be careful, considering that I'm still trying to maintain a general balance of multiple genres on my albums log.  But Septicflesh did something legendary for me, and I wanted more.

I turned this on immediately after finishing their previous album, Communion, and suddenly I was blasted with a wave of heaviness and disturbing violins that were just loud enough to echo through the wall of sound created by the blasting.  I was face-punched with the words "what the fuck just happened" playing in my head constantly.  Here in The Vampire from Nazareth, the violins and the female backing singer are just fucking surreal.  It's like listening to death metal from another world.  This weirdness and heaviness combo is as present as ever in the more brutal and tribal title track.  It's slower and more dramatic than before, like it's a surreal ballad or a funeral dirge for a pharaoh.  And suddenly, it gets louder and louder until an army of zombies and spirits declares war on your earlobes.

I was taken by surprise when the mid-tempo behavior of songs like Narcissus and Sunlight/Moonlight came into play on Pyramid God, which takes the melodeath route.  Of course, halfway through it takes the surreal route again to make sure its main riff doesn't get overused.  This was the best decision as it helped the song feel more in place.  Five-Pointed Star is where the band shows off the three biggest angles of the album by switching between them: guitar-lead blasts, hyperactice symphonic melodies, and slower funeral dirge instrumentals.  But a complete different element arises in Oceans of Grey, where industrial repetition and even tremelo-picking take their place in between serene backdrops and djenty composition.  Unlike the other songs which were largely excellent pairings between the two focal genres that make up the band, Oceans of Grey is a catchy and yet ever-mutating experience of organized stability and metal chaos acting as two sides of the same coin.  Up to that point, I decided it was my favorite Septicflesh song, bearing a vibe that deeply reminded me of my own zombie horde from my debut novel, as cinematic metal played a heavy part in writing battle scenes.

Halfway through it, I was more than eager to see what The Undead Keep Dreaming held in store for me.  I was very happy with its dissonant / blackened guitar style switching with Devourment drumming paired with a deep-voiced male choir in the back.  This song's honestly hard to peg down genre-wise.  It's obviously prog, but it has elements of slam death, deathcore, black, symphonic, funeral doom, all switching through a spinning wheel of experimentation.  I suppose this is the song where Septicflesh proved they could literally do anything.  No matter what direction the band took in that song, I found myself eager for more and more directions and randomness.

We go back to accessibility on Rising, which is more riff-oriented.  The symphonic sounds take a big step backward to allow the guitarists to do the work, which I think is perfectly fine considering that the symphonic genre had a heavier say on this album already than it did on Communion.  And this song is also shorter, so while it fits the melodeath sound of Pyramid God, maintaining the album's balance, it doesn't feature the avant-garde second half which connected Pyramid God to the two before that, so it's a wecome, simple addition that's good while it lasts.  Apocalypse, however, goes back to those classical sirens and gothic weirdness that the album made a point of, and even feells like something out of a Tim Burton movie at the begginning.  It becomes a combination of extremities, symphonies and progginess much like half of Emperor's final album, Prometheus.  As that is my choice for the number 1 black metal album, I welcome this as ithis direction is both consistent with the album's behavior and reflects why I gave Emperor's album that position.  However, the experimental side of the violin interludes rings of Blut Aus Nord's recent album, Disharmonium Nahab, which is practically the scariest album I've ever heard and is also a welcome ingredient.

Next comes mad Architect, which features a wacky and maybe even dorky cabaret intro of piano and violin that proves that Septicflesh aren't afraid of the dorkier side of their chosen influence.  But the brutal and monotone blastbeats find their way into the song before combining with the dorky side on occasion, delivering something absolutely gothic in spirit and menacing in sound, as if I just walked into an abandoned circus where a clown is waiting to kill me.  So now their brilliance found its way into Pleasure Island.  As the lyrics represent going through a labyrinth, I find that this decision to go both menacing and quirky to be a perfectly artistic one.  And finally, we have Therianthropy, which starts Sotoris V. singing before we get to a good and energetic power-riff which leads us to the death metal we know the band for.

Most people favor Communion, and I know why: this album is less accessible than Communion, and as such it even rings a little of the avant-garde behavior we know Blut Aus Nord for.  But the way I see it, that's a very healthy step forward. Septicflesh improved on everything that made Communion so brilliant and special, being heavier than ever before, reaching heights in that vein that have rarely been met by a select few, and delivered a cinematic experience that no one had created before.  The most important thing, however, is that Septicflesh not only improved on their brutality, but found a stronger balance between their own death metal sound and the classical genre by relying on the spirit of war songs and funeral dirges.

Every one in a while I find that one album that makes me question my standards for a genre.  The Great Mass is the next album to do that.  I'm gonna cement this here as my new choice for my number one death metal album, and I may go back to Morbid Angel to see if I still feel the same way about them.

100

I avoided Septicflesh for a long time during my early days in discovering music because my Christian behavior was more fear-oriented at the time.  These days I'm less and less afraid and don't really treat these things as things that'll kill me.  Thing is, I never really got into "symphonic death metal" as a thing, so I ignored these guys and Fleshgod Apocalypse for a while.  Now I'm slowly getting back into metal and music thanks to a whole new year of albums ahead of us: 2024, the last year of the first half of this decade.  Hell, Ryan Adams gave us four new studio albums on New Years. 

This is my first Septicflesh album, and I knew they made a point of diversity since their early days from the genre tagging of their debut on RYM.  But seeing this one only tagged as "symphonic metal and death metal" made me weary about the possibility of this being another monotone and potentially overrated album.  But if there's gonna be a genre passed around called "symphonic death metal," then I'm gonna explore it.  And thankfully, this album gave me everything I could ask for.

This whole album is about as unpredictable as an art film, but it never once breaks the character the band gives this release.  We have moments that are just brutal, murderous and terrifying to an otherworldly extreme, such as on the title track, but we also have room for some of that Children of God mindfuckery, like the progressive violin interludes on Persepolis.  We even have some of that Nile-style mysticism on Anubis, which favors atmosphere over death heaviness, but transitions effortlessly from the edgy opener.  "We the Gods' is practically a black death hybrid, something that was amiss on this album despite the variety.  But the real clincher here is its progginess and catchiness.  And Sunlight/Moonlight has a slower, higher and more melodic sound which might have the feel of the album fully intact thanks to its unpredictability, but also sounds like something off of Dark Tranquility's Damage Done, except better.  The same foes for our closer, Narcissus, although it's much catchier.  And let's take Sangreal's deathcore breakdown paired with the rhythmic melody that between two instruments starts out in the background and switches to the front before switching to the vocalists taking turns.  Brilliant usage of simplicity and quirkiness.  Brilliant.

On top of this, we have two different singers switching between one impressively deep vocalist and another with clearer and higher-pitched singing, both of which bring out the best of the songs they sing.  This can be compared to the works of System of a Down with their singers, and both singers are absolutely perfect, and is most blatantly present on Sunlight/Moonlight.  Seth Siro Anton might have the best death metal voice I've ever heard.

About our title track... I just gotta say it... that vocal riff?

It's the Meow Mix theme song.  It's literally the fucking Meow Mix theme song with maybe a slightly higher pitch in note at the end.  But I don't really know if I can take off points for that, because as much as I don't want to say this, the riff works perfectly with the song, and it doesn't change the fact that this album is still giving me everything I asked for.

Septicflesh boasted a level of creativity that I beg for every time I hear an album, especially in genres loaded with posers.  And boy, is metal full of them.  But Septicflesh are anything but.  They are composers of the highest metallic form and have committed the rare achievement of perfecting symphonic metal, overcoming it cheese and relying on whatever menace may be found in traditional classical or even movie soundtracks.  This album switches between the lighter influences of prog, doom, black with just enough behavior to incorporate into a different type of death metal song.  In fact, in essence they're like the death metal band I myself would form if I wanted to form one: cover a couple loosely connected genres with even balance while incorporating other influences and a couple singers.  Although, even if I did, what are the chances I'd be as good at it as Septicflesh?

I'm nowhere near into solo Ozzy as I am into Black Sabbath, and I know I'm not alone in this.  Because of this, I've spent very little time in Ozzy's solo career.  Up until today, I had only heard his first two albums.  I really think it's about time I stopped putting both solo Ozzy and solo Dio off and gotten to a couple of their albums.  But I'll keep this brief.

I was glad that each song felt a little different at times.  Some were pretty speedy like the title track and (ironically) "Slow Down," some were more about the beat and biker attitude like "Waiting for Darkness," and songs like "So Tired" added a more symphonic and melodic side, steering itself away from typical power ballads by keeping the gothic vibes of the album intact.  There's also some time for raw creepiness a la Alice Cooper, like on the song "Spiders."  But I think what really made the album so enjoyable is that all the melodies are very strong.  It seems to be a major focus on the album where everything else, including the variety factor, seems to work around the melodies.  And this leads up to the album's only flaw: stylistically and structurally, it's a pretty typical 80's heavy metal album.  None of the songs are bad, but thanks to this, it comes nowhere near Paranoid as a whole.  In fact, its typical structure is also why I'm keeping this brief, because there really isn't a lot stylistically that's unique enough to talk about.

Well, I'm largely impressed with this album.  From what I can remember, this seems more focused on doing different things with typical heavy metal songs than Blizzard of Ozz.  This is a great continuation of a solo career built on two great albums, and I highly recommend it for any metal fan that wants darkness in their music, even for extreme metalheads.

The gothic doom sound pioneered by My Dying Bride and Type O Negative would be replicated by a large portion of the gothic scene, including Draconian, who mastered the basics of the genre on the debut without much creativity attached.  Doom and gothic fans seem to love their second album, Arcane Rain Fell, so I guess this was the most exciting part of exploring their catalogue.  When I turned this on, I was hoping for a serious improvement over the original and a stone-cold classic.

It's obvious that the band is becoming more poetic with their lyricism.  There seems to be a stronger focus on the imagery of the scene they're a part of.  And thanks to a stronger idea of using faint foregrounds as atmospheric tools, such as the choral backing vocals on The Apostacy Castle, the album has a stronger effect on the listener than before.  Because of this, the emotional core of the band is a little stronger here.  The elements that made the debut album good to begin with have a stronger harmony and balance.  This also means that certain aspects are going to shine at certain times even more than they did on the last album.  It was easy for certain focal points to shine when there was less harmony, but with a stronger sense of harmony from everything and stronger skill from the band, the focal points (when given extra strength), such as the bombastic gothica of Heaven Laid in Tears or the intro's slow sludge, feel more impressive.  In other words, the band is able to recreate the last album and all of its strengths with one difference: they've become a BAND.

Having said this, there are two problems I have with this album.  First, in following completely in the vein of the last album, it also recreates the sameyness problem.  While all of the songs are enjoyable, we know what we're getting.  And the second problem is that the lady singer is severely underused.  The male is given total priority, and it's kind of a shame.  I mean, as absolutely beautiful as our ending 15-minute track is, it's same old Draconian.  So the end all be all is that this is a slight improvement over a pretty good debut, and Draconian know who they want to be which from a moral perspective is perfectly fine, but from a musician's perspective it hurts their creative prowess.

This is a pretty special day for me.  I have officially marked my 13,000th music album heard.  And for that position I chose Kanye's live album, Late Orchestration.  I'm really happy with the outcome of recent musical ventures, but there's more to it.  Apparently, as this is smackdab in the middle of my goth metal phase, today just so happens to be the 20th anniversary of the debut album by one of the goth metal bands I was considering exploring: Draconian.  Since I was struggling with which band to check out next, the revelation made my decision.  Thanks a bunch to Shadowdoom9 for discovering this!

So Draconian are pretty much what you want from a gothic doom metal act: this slow droning and gothic sound have a strong potency, and this sound of theirs is so well done and good that it pretty much has a lot of staying power.  Even though this means the album's pretty samey, the sound really doesn't get tiring thanks to perfect production and a good balance between timing and melody, whether slow or fast.  These are all aspects that musicians can easily screw up, and so far Draconian don't seem to be doing that.  The fact that they were able to accomplish that much at least on the debut seems to be what makes this album a well-received classic among fans of the niche appeal.  However, as far as creating an album goes, I feel that I should only give the album extra points for its monotony while still acknowledging that they could've done more if they got the general idea right on their first try.  They could've even only taken one extra step forward in the creative department and improved this album quickly.  Despite this, I loved the inclusion of that very short folk song near the end.  It really brought some Celtic vibes to the album, which were out of place stylistically but perfectly suitable emotionally.

So while it's perfectly clear that Draconian had a strong grip on their style and identity with this album, a couple other things are very obvious: they were a less creative My Dying Bride with all of Tristania's vocal tricks, and featuring less potency on both sides of this delivery.  I mean, I like JUST finished the Tristania catalog a couple days ago, and I love The Dreadful Hours so the comparisons are pretty easy.  So unfortunately, I'd have to say that despite the clear strengths and staying power, this is a generic debut by technicality.  Still, it fit the vibe I was looking for, gives a fan what a fan wants, is good for fans of My Dying Bride, Type O Negative and Tristania and personally really helped me with the vibe of a novel I'm working on.  So I'll recommend this easy but well-produced album if not just to check out another gothic doom act.

I'm quite the Alice in Chains fan.  Way back when I was first getting into regular album exploration, one of my first ever binges was grunge, and that binge would be on and off for years before I felt I had exhausted all the albums worth listening to.  Of course, I kind of avoided solo Cantrell because I didn't want to explore a solo act just for a relation to Alice in Chains.  But the way I see it, a grunge junkie who actually started a wiki on it has an obligation, even if he's not working on the wiki anymore.

I heard the decent but unimpressive debut, Boggy Depot, before heading to this, and it's easy to see that Cantrell belongs in the metal world.  Right from the start, Cantrell makes a point of telling you that this is an Alice in Chains solo act by recounting that same dark and sludgy sound on the first track.  But the album doesn't stay that way; it goes from harder to softer on a beautiful balance, sometimes progressively.  Songs like Angel Eyes which bridge that poppy lightweight alternative with the noisiness of grunge riffs mingle well with softer and more acoustic bits with a slight emphasis on psychedelic country.  It made me realize that I wished there was a slight more alt-rock and psychedelic in Dirt, then it might've risen on my overall log.

However, there are a couple problems with this album.  First of all, the writing certainly isn't as unique or inspired as Alice in Chains.  It seems more predictable this time, despite all its efforts to both remind one of Alice in Chains and separate itself from the band.  The second problem is that the emotional aspect is not recounted much.  It's occasionally there, but it's lightweight.  This especially hurts if you know that Cantrell was with Alice in Chains, which means this overlong album is poppier.  So the variety eventually gets samey.

Well, I can't say this is my favorite grunge metal album.  I was hoping to love it for its connection to Alice in Chains, but I knew it was a bit much to ask for.  It's a pretty fun album with some cool songs, but totally passable.

So while I can't say I'm a Tristania "fan," I certainly appreciate how they've more or less become the kind of band I was looking for by the third album: a band that was willing to try a bunch of new things and differentiate songs.  The way I see it, a band good at multiple genres is a band with multiple talents, and I prefer a band with multiple talents over a band with one talent.  And of course, I'd like for it to show on a full album time and time again.  Although struggling with this on their first two albums, Tristania mastered this personality aspect on their third, and continued it on Ashes.

Ashes sees a dramatic shift from the symphonic sound in the long run.  The entire purpose of this album is to morph songs from genre to genre by using mood to keep the flow intact.  This album succeeds at this in every aspect, and may even be better at this than the previous album where they finally nailed the craft.  We have instances of symphonic blending with atmpsheric ethereal wave to bring out Tristania's strong gothic presence while still maintaining a metal edge as we see influences ranging from death metal to metalcore.  And it all fits the sadness and anger of this work.

However, while a part of me would like to give an album like that five stars, there are two major problems getting in the way of that.  First of all, one of the strongest aspects of World of Glass, the previous album, was that the vocal melodies and the instrument's melodies paired together beautifully despite being so different.  There is much less melody here in the vocals, leaving the instruments to deliver many beautiful melodies.  On top of that, the production is a little fuzzier, slightly drowning the vocals.

I think this is a well made album for its strengths, and it continues exactly what I wanted to see from Tristania in a diversity aspect.  But its flaws are pretty obvious.  Otherwise, this is an album where Tristania rely on their personality, and it makes for a good release in need of remastering.

After having finished the Type O Negative catalog, my next goth metal band to go through would be one I checked out a couple albums by years ago but wasn't fully into save one album: Tristania, and the album was Beyond the Veil.  After a revisit to the band, my opinions on their debut were exactly the same: same song ten times, beautiful and melodic but kind of generic.  I liked the next one slightly more, though; varied and experimental, even though every song is covering each influence in small doses, technically meaning that the variety aspect is hypocritically handled IMO by not bothering to differentiate the songs.  After checking out the genre tagging of their third album, World of Glass, I was interested in what these other sounds were supposed to be.

We get all of the familiar elements of the previous album with more of an idea of differentiating focal points on a track-by-track basis as opposed to combining them all in every track.  This is the best possible decision due to the extra influences that came aboard, notably the ethereal wave and the industrial metal.  There was so much to their identity, that they had to think about writing DIFFERENT TYPES of songs.  It might've been the only way to stay relevant to the goth scene.  And I'd say it worked.  Songs like The Shining Path and Crushed Dreams are all about that beautiful symphonic vibe, but there are even weirder, unique moments like the industrial Modern End which features heavy usage of repetitive riffs and a carefully placed symphonic layer to make it unique to the industrial vibe.  And considering how slow and dark Wormwood was, I'd say it was basically an epic doom metal track hiding under the symphonic tag and Tristania's signature aura.  There will be plenty of room for doom and death to make careful appearances depending on the pre-established vibes of each song, and each one has its own strong presence.  But there are a couple morphers which carry a few influences, progressively organized to keep the flow going and the Tristania feel strong.

There's been those who love this album, and those disappointed in the new directions.  Some ever say that this is a less "melodic" album.  But I think the melodies for both the instrumentation and the vocalists, though noticeably very different from each other, go hand in hand to keep the vibes strong.  I can honestly say that I prefer this Tristania album over the first two, and I hope to see more new ideas in the other albums.

Having completed the albums of Type O negative on my gothic binge, I have now turned to Tristania, a band I was already familiar with but haven't heard in a long time.  I love the idea of a symphonic gothic side, being a Phantom of the Opera fan myself, and I was really eager to see if I loved this album as much as I did years ago when I first heard it.  Of course, since I have a lot of music to listen to and have always had a lot to listen to, I hadn't heard this again in years.  This gothic binge of mine is just what I needed to visit it again.

Tristania's presence is built on two things: switching up the sounds, and constant flow.  Their first album might've been just a good gothic album that stood out with a heavily symphonic touch, but this was the album where those strengths were fleshed out in a more artistic presence.  Every song takes a plethora of different approaches all used to empower its never-wavering atmosphere of theatrical romance and darkness.  We get plenty of the violins and pianos that come with the symphonic side, but we're also given time to explore the darker side of metal.  The death metal vocals from the previous album were no longer just a unique gimmick to symphonic metal, it was given matching music to switch out with the gothic, the symphonic and the progressive.  We're constantly on a merry-go-round of focal points that all bring out Tristania's personality.  Unfortunately, this also means every song is effectively tackling all the same elements, so the variety aspect isn't perfectly handled, not like it would later be on World of Glass.

Tristania were no longer a gimmick band with this album.  They helped the 90's prove that symphonic music is just as relevant to bringing out metal's strengths to the world as any of the speedy thrash or slow and psychedelic doom.  This, with Nightfall in Middle Earth and Theli, are essential to this, and this was the album that was the proggiest and most unpredictable.

Type O Negative set themselves up as the leading example of what gothic metal should sound like early on in their career.  Many gothic bands have tried to emulate them or use them as a basis for what to sound like, but this doesn't mean Type O Negative always had success.  At one point, the went more mainstream, and some Type O Negative fans have been unfair to this album, ignoring it.  I'm not that type, however, as I embrace branching out.  Life Is Killing Me is considered the album that stopped the golden era of this band, but "golden" and "good" are still two different things.

Right from the start, the album makes a point of noisy production, doomy moments and punk undertones, so we already know what we're getting. Life Is Killing Me lyrically tackles many of the negative thoughts of Steele's mind at the time, dealing with mental instability and a midlife crisis, but the strengthened focus on alternative and pop structures gives this album a much more cheerful disposition.  We get a switch between gothic metal, alternative metal and rock, and gothic doom taking up most of the album, with occasional deathrock bursts with I Like Goils and Angry Itch serving as excellent examples.  Type O Negative never got over punk.

Despite the switch between these three major focal points, we still get some minimal but effective moments of creativity, such as that weird, surreal and repetitive riff in the backdrop of Gimme That.  That's easily one of my favorite aspects of the album.  However, because of the poppier structures, there's less of a romantic and atmospheric approach.  And it's not like we get very many amazing metal solos.

Type O Negative made it perfectly clear with this album that they still had the ability to deliver some fantastic melodies with their production style, but in the effort to go mainstream they forgot to be as atmospheric in their style as in the production.  But that's the only strength of TON that's absent from this album.  Otherwise, this is a perfectly fine Type O Negative album that will give a fan what's asked for.

I've officially become a fan of Type O Negative upon my revisits of Bloody Kisses and October Rust, as well as my exposure to World Coming Down and The Least Worst of Type O Negative.  I'm in love with their reliance on presence and personality over sticking with a scene, because they didn't really have much of a "scene" to stick to when they came out.  They helped invent goth metal, so they were very unique.  They also became controversial for their gruesome lyrical content, which showed heavily on their debut, Slow Deep and Hard, which mingled goth metal, doom metal and even bits of crossover thrash.  Now it seemed a little awkward but good at first, so they took the personality aspect to the next level and recorded a fake live album to show off that they were a black comedy band in a sense.

Basically, Type O negative's debut was when they were introducing their style, but The Origin of the Feces is the album where they were introducing their personality, and it didn't really get in the way of the music because the parody aspects were still handled in a serious manner to help the album.  Peter Steele feels like a real rocker and a metalhead when speaking out to the fake audience.  There's less of a drifting doom effect in this 40-minute album than the hour-long debut, and the production technique was replaced with a noisier and punkish sound that perfectly fused the doom and gothic elements with the crossover thrash bits that felt awkward on the debut.  Because of this, every great song from the original album is made more consistent, less awkward and easier to get behind.  This really isn't an album for diehard doom fans because of the noise; no, it's an album for fans of Type O Negative's personality as well as their music.  And if you have the extended edition at your disposal, you at least have to listen to the GORGEOUS doom metal cover of Black Sabbath's Paranoid.  It's more haunting and surreal than the fast-paced heavy metal original.  I honestly prefer it.

I finally have an ACTUAL controversial opinion: this is one of Type O negative's best albums.  This is boldness with a beautiful noise-production style and excellent flow, making this an improved variant of their debut if you ask me.  The joke might be unfunny or even pointless to some, but this sophomore work isn't so drawn out, each song has its own identity, and the noisier sound and mixing makes everything about the past album feel more natural, as if they finally found a proper ground to work with, removing some smoothness of the doom metal for this sound.  Once the joke wears off, there's personality, because this album really does feel like a live album with a very comedic side, like the cricket sounds at the end.  If only the original version included that incredible Paranoid cover, then I might've given it a 100.

Type O Negative are masters of eerily glowing atmospheres, being the perfect example of what a goth metal band should sound like.  They've done a lot during their short time as far as musical innovation goes, and they've even gone almost as far as The Beatles have by going into genre after genre and applying it to their personality.  And one of their most personal albums is their most famous: October Rust.

What we see in October Rust is the decision to go mainstream, and succeed.  This has very little to do with the concept as selling out, although the general sound of the album is less heavy.  Many of these songs fall under rock instead of metal, or maybe a hybrid of the two.  The production technique used throughout the album maintains a heavily-polished pop sound, which brings out all of the romantic strengths.  And Type O Negative once again play through a plethora of different styles, including their doom metal sound from the early days.  But many of the other influences are more fit for rock, like the shoegaze aspects and the darkwave reverb.  Because of this production type, many of the songs, while diverse, occasionally absorb into each other.  Safer to say, they are more similar sounding to each other than the songs off of Bloody Kisses.  There's even a little of this in World Coming Down.

October Rust is a very beautiful album, but it's not my favorite of the group.  This is still an excellent example of goth metal focusing on the art of the sound itself rather than writing the same song over and over again (looking at you, post-Dreadful Hours MDB).  The ideas on this album are built for a wider audience, and I think they did a good job of spreading word of the gothic sound to the masses.

Goth metal is one of my least explored genres, which I think is extremely hypocritical of me considering that I adore gothic and dark touches in things.  You have Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf to thank for that one.  As such, I've only heard a couple of Type O Negative albums, namely their most famous two: Bloody Kisses and October Rust.  I'm literally working on a couple of vampire novel ideas, and my debut novel was partly about zombies.  Ever since I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas as a kid, I realized how much I like dark and gothic stuff.  The desire for it became stronger and stronger, and the best album I can think of that replicates my current love of darkness is Bloody Kisses.

Bloody Kisses is an album all about the balance of everything that makes music what it is.  For example, the wide variety of the album brings gothic metal and rock into the world of doom, alternative, psych, hardcore punk, shoegaze and industrial in random places, despite the fact that we still have a primarily gothic sound.  The album's shorter songs have a tendency to morph into other genres while never breaking form, whereas the slower songs are all about the atmospheric gothic doom sound that fans of darker and slower music tend to love.  Yes, the songs still morph occasionally and the atmosphere is a gorgeously produced blend of the two genres with Steele's voice poetically chanting Nick Cave style topics with flawless delivery, which brings me to the next form of balance: deep gothic whispers and growls as well as higher pitched singing.  Everything in between is there.  This variety also has a bit of a humorous side, as we get a serious parody of hippie pop rock and a couple hardcore punk intros and outros for certain gloomy gothic doom songs.  And they still remain catchy as well as heavy.

On top of this Beatles-style exploration of the metal and rock worlds, there is a balance of the slower droning that the niche fanbase loves as well as some serious accessibility.  I mean, even the slower songs have SOME catchiness about them, because Type O Negative is one of the best bands you can get when looking for a melodic act.  This never gets in the way of whatever moods the band is trying to go for, and unlike a similarly handled album, say the overly-ambitious self-titled Beatles album, there are NO weak tracks.  In fact, the segues and skits have so much atmospheric power in them that I can't possibly even enjoy the idea of listening to this album without them.  I'm really glad Type O Negative made that choice, considering their back-to-back jokes tracks from their next album, October Rust, did nothing to set up the mood for that album.  On Bloody Kisses, it's different; they're all about setting up sexual and gothic tones.

I enjoyed every atmosphere, every note played and every word sung.  The whole album shows the band mastering the advanced tricks of music in a perfectly balanced way, and its presence glows green with gothic power and lust.  I'm having trouble deciding whether this is my favorite goth album instead of Let Love In.  It's an extremely close call.  On the second listen, October Rust has made it to my top 50 albums of all time, and I can even say I enjoy this album more than Paranoid, an honor I've given to only four other albums at this point.

Evoken had to step it up to compare this time, and while I don't feel that they did that with the titular opener, I still greatly enjoyed what I heard.  The production was cleaner and less dense, so it was more accessible.  But it didn't lose any of the structural strengths and emotional core of any of the songs from Antithesis.  I could only hope that the other songs wouldn't sound exactly the same.  Thankfully, Mare Erythraeum didn't.  I've gone on about how Antithesis has some gothic touches, but this is more than just touches.  This is the kind of heavily gothic doom you'd expect from My Dying Bride, and it's just as good as you'd expect from MDB.  There are few changes in the main riff, but thankfully everything in the background is there to change things up and either get more melancholy, more artistic or even more melodic.  It all depends on the section.  This beautifully instrumental epic also goes into an amazing metal solo which is quite out of place for Evoken's catalogue, but also perfectly fitting for this album.  That tells me that they're innovating once again.

We re-enter the death doom with a heavy dose on Of Purest Absolution.  Despite that, it's surprisingly more melodic as well, and throughout the middle section, the doom is placed behind an aquatic guitar riff that carefully layers over the doom without drowning it out.  The third section relies on none of that and goes right for tribal drumming and placing the vocals in the foreground to really bring out that deathly vibe.  Astray in Eternal Light is dense in its production, but not so baritone.  It's a very noisy track built on the same guitar sound as the middle section of the previous song.  We also get clearer vocals to bring in more of a depressing tone as opposed to the deep-seeded hatred we've been subjected to before.  But there's also something very sensual about the vocals, although this guy can't beat Peter Steele at this game.  And I also feel that the monotone nature of the album isn't quite as strong as before, as much of it is simply going "up down up down" between two notes.  So while it's a bit unique to the album for shifting focuses of similar elements in the same way that every song in Antithesis did, I can't help but feel it's a bit weaker than the previous songs.

Descend the Lifeless Womb is louder, deeper and slower, once again pushing the soul past its limits.  And boy, does it feel epic.  The general idea of funeral doom is extremely strong on this track.  Unfortunately, because it's so standard, it feels like it's missing something in comparison to the first three songs.  This is remedied during the third act, where things get more atmospheric and clear, as opposed to rough and dirty, and it features an ambient guitar drone which feels very astral.  Suffer a Martyr's Trial begins very quietly and carefully steers into some droning sludge and doom.  Throughout the thirteen minutes, it changes its monotone riffs and the back-layers of the density constantly, bringing back the overall high quality of the first three tracks as well as the previous two albums.  And because of this, the longest song on the album goes by more speedily, even when much of it is snails pushing their way through heavy mounds of dirt.  And finally, we have a single riff played with an orchestra of variation in the back, Orogeny, which has this post-metal vibe about it.

I have to say, I really like how straight-forward and accessible this is, not because a weird-ass like me who enjoyed Grand Declaration of War needs accessibility, but because it represents an incredibly healthy and high-grade kind of album which can be a very good introduction for noobs to get into both death doom and funeral doom, maybe even doom in general.  I honestly don't know why these guys aren't more popular in the doom community.  Is it the surrealism of esoteric?  The traditional behavior of Skepticism?  Either way, these guys are way underappreciated.  Unfortunately, this also sometimes gets in the way of the emotional core, which didn't always feel so varied.

Well I can safely say that at this point, my favorite funeral doom band is definitely Evoken for their ability to deliver seriously heavy music.  Even though this wasn't quite as creative as the last two albums, it more or less got the job done and would make a great introduction into doom, one that's very heavy but never too dense.  So I'd say this is another success for the band.

What with doom metal being my new primary focus, I'm becoming more determined than ever to perfect a proper chart of it all because my overall knowledge and experience of its various subgenres is actually minimal.  I've only heard 17 death doom albums and 11 funeral doom, including only three Evoken albums.  Thankfully, Evoken can add to both to help, so I have a foundation for either genre.  I already reviewed two other Evoken albums over the past couple of days, and I was more impressed with the atmospheric focus of their second in comparison to their good but generic debut.  I had no idea of knowing what was going to happen.

After our creepy intro of noise and wails, In Solitary Ruin covers a freakishly heavy blackened death background molding with structural and atmospheric aspects of the previous album, Quietus.  The band wasn't afraid to teeter-totter between slow, middle and fast paces in order to keep the song's specific mood original and to keep the layout challenging.  This one song is an incredible combination of doom, death, post and even black, aurally turning hell itself into a cold and desolate winter world with a few instances of hypnotic gothic guitars.

Now that I've written a good paragraph about the 10-minute intro and the first epic, let's head to the next song: Accursed Premonition, which sets up a slightly more classical vibe with hypnotic, aquatic dripping of noise and some choral vocals.  It starts out much clearer than In Solitary Ruin, and the atmosphere is more gothic and funeral, and slightly less death to make room for a little more black.  This song doesn't take a lot of time to speed up, either, even going into some much lighter moments and switching to heavily blackened ones without ever losing its hypnotic presence.

The Mournful Refusal is deathlier in its backgrounds, but includes clearer and higher-pitched guitars digging into some more melodic territory, bringing back the hypnotic gothic picking as well, and including the speedy and tamed drumming of In Solitary Ruin.  Every bit of slower or faster pacing is used sparingly, and normally only by one instrument at a time to help the middle-pacing of the song's primary focus.  Even for the longest song on the track, the atmospheres are always shifting in consistent ways, relying on the occassional metal solo, molding perfectly with the vibe and giving us another unique track to the album.

Pavor Nocturnus throws us right into the middle of neoclassical darkwave paired with loud guitars, increasing the melody factor.  The synths give us a strangely heavenly approach, like the lamentation of seeing a spirit of a beloved one rise to the sun shining beyond silver clouds and entering Heaven.  Pavor Nocturnus shows a perfect layout where each and every shift is carefully built up to and flows with incredible consistency.  Eventually it evolves into a storm of black riffage with flawless atmospheric riffage, but even that devolves into another doomy outro.

And now we enter the title track.  We have quiet synths leading us into the gloom of gothic doom metal, slightly romantic but just as scary as before.  But this song also gradually gets more extreme and less gothic overtime until it returns to the gothic behavior during the outro.  What we have here is a patient and sometimes progressive outlook on many of the elements that made previous songs so special, using length in unpredictable manners.

The final track is The last of Vitality, and it doesn't hesitate to start us off with a snailish stoner riff bereft of any of the black and death influences the album boasted about for so long.  And we get our most haunting dungeon synth backdrops to go with it, acting much more upfront.  But we soon get into a ferocious blast of bestial black speed and fury, almost creating a feeling of riding a motorcycle through a massive graveyard.  But we return to the gothic synths and our singer's growls turn into whispers.  This song is taking us all the way across the world of death: above the graveyard, six feet under all the bloodied dirt, and straight into heaven with no regard for sanity.  Our most haunting synths and backing vocals are featured here, creating what I believe is a perfect ending.

It is so true that these songs are very long, but for once in my life I came across a doom album that managed to keep these lengths generally inventive and creative.  A large part of it was the fact that this is one of the most deathly and metallic atmospheres I have ever heard, relying on a number of metallic elements like black and goth as well as non-metallic elements like dungeon synth and darkwave to get a very strong hypnotic vibe.  This is the kind of album where many of the songs will switch out the same elements every so often, justifying such a move by applying different levels of focus to both different moods and different genres, so it's an incredible challenge to predict what's going to happen.

I have never heard a doom metal album like this.  Antithesis of Light gave me more than what I ask for from a good album.  This is the first funeral doom album that passed the fifty minute mark and didn't feel too long, because its atmosphere, emotional core and presentation are all superbly well thought out.  Each brand of hypnosis is similar yet shifting.  Very diverse and intense, depending on my future moods this could very well be the best doom metal album I've ever heard.

Now that I'm more serious about exploring doom metal, Evoken has become a top priority for their high reputation in my least favorite doom genre: funeral.  EVoken bridged the gap between death doom and funeral doom on their debut, already making a name for themselves as one of the darkest bands on Earth since the debut's atmosphere was perfect, although the variety was low.  Let's see what they can do with death and funeral this time.

There's a stronger structural touch which is a bit more unpredictable and organized at the same time.  That drumming in Burning really added another layer of depth to an already deep and seriously atmospheric song.  Thanks to an thin-layer of general creepiness akin to a Blut Aus Nord album, there's a unique touch to this album without losing the deathly vibes of their debut, which makes the vibe of the first two tracks more ghostly than anything.  After having heard and loved In Their Darkened Shrines after the second playthrough, I've been itching for more "ghostly" metal.  The vibe of Withering Indignation, however, is totally different.  The snailish doom has a serious rasp to it akin to stoner metal or a good Boris song.  The droning creates a perfect vibe as dungeon-synth backdrops occasionally make their way into the mix.  It's a great combination of psychedelic noise and neoclassical ambiance.  Tending the Dire Hatred starts by following the same vein as before, but when it switches to a faster tempo, we get a raw heavy metal vibe that switches to tribal drumming like in a Neurosis album.  But eventually it calms down into a very dungeon-grounded song when the metal becomes equal to or second to the synth via atmospheric focus.  And Where Ghosts Fall Silent seems to switch through several of the previously established vibes in a manner similar to My Dying Bride until settling on a slower death doom sound.  The title track builds itself on louder drums and synths for a more menacing approach to its own reverb.  But Embrace the Emptiness is pretty much a shameless rehash, even more so than Quietus, even though it was still a good doom song.  Thankfully, the final track goes into softer alternative territory while maintaining that reverb-based sadness of the album.

I think this album really showcases the band's willingness to push forward everything that made the first album so good.  And while there is still a little sameyness attached, for the most part this highly hypnotic sophomore album proves that Evoken are more than willing to grow so that they can be seen as one of the best in doom.  For the most part, I was very pleased with the band's sense of atmosphere, experimentation, emotion and improved variety.  This is easily much better than the debut.

Evoken seems to be considered as essential to funeral doom metal as Esoteric.  They're one of those bands that many say has never made a bad album.  The debut left an impact on the metal world for helping to cement a darker side of funeral by combining it with the death doom of bands like My Dying Bride and Katatonia.  So when you combine the two, I would expect the result to be something even darker than the norm.  But for a debut, how well could it go the first time?

From front to back, atmosphere was their strongest point, and in the context of the funeral sound, that's exactly what they needed.  This careful balance between the sombre classical sound of funeral death and that malevolent sense of fear and anger that death doom is known for is carefully handled.  One of the biggest pros of the album is the variety of vocals, going from low growls to despairing cries to black metal pitches.  So we get the a very healthy doom experience that covers a lot of ground for the fans of the sombre world of doom, and not the psychedelic Sabbath lovers.  The guitar tone has a fairly gothic touch to it to bring out more of the funereal vibes  Of course, this is a funeral doom metal album.  There's a general flaw that's apparent in so much doom metal, especially the funeral brand: the length and sameyness of the songs.  A couple of these would be five-star songs if I couldn't tell what was gonna happen next. 

For a debut it was nice.  The atmosphere was more than what I asked for and much more impressive than what a debut album generally says about the act.  But as far as structuring a song goes, these guys are pretty standard.  They got the mood just right and left the idea of variety and uniqueness out the window, but at least they nailed what they focused on.

While putting together my recent Top 100 Death Metal Albums chart (ending with all 100 albums ranked 9/10 or higher on my chart), I was getting through an album that a few people here on Metal Academy loved: Altars of Madness by Morbid Angel.  I liked it so much that I decided to listen to most of their first six albums not once but twice.  This really helped me evolve my death metal standards, and can now safely say that my current pick for the number one death metal band for ALL the right reasons is Morbid Angel.  Reasons include: having a better debut than Death themselves, a more surreal willingness to evolve, heavier and darker music, no lightening their heaviness later on and two incredible vocalists with their own classic eras.  The first six are all death essentials, and I even gave two of their albums perfect ratings.  After the glory that was Gateways to Annihilation, their slowest but doomiest and possibly most soul-crushing and psychedelic effort, I was hoping I would once again be going against the metal grain and enjoy Heretic, the first of their albums that is considered unnecessary.

Well, I gotta say it.  For the most part, their heaviness didn't wane from their previous effort.  Morbid Angel went back to death metal roots with this one, and because of that, there's practically no willingness to evolve.  This means that the album is largely made up of standard pounding death.  The album doesn't do anything freaky or surreal until Place of Many Deaths, which is seven songs totaling up to 25 minutes in.  Only then does it go into weird, freaky and creepy background ambiance akin to Blut Aus Nord's The Work Which Transforms God.  Lemme tell you, it was a major breath of fresh air to get away from another mid-to-low-tuned flat-ass pounder with only a couple decent riffs to make it fairly enjoyable.  But deep down I knew that the chances of this continuing through the album were minimal, but not impossible.  Turns out, that minimal chance had a breath left for the two-minute ambient track, "Abyssous."  But as soon as that was done, we went right back to what the band was playing for the first six tracks.  Thankfully, it gets pretty unexpected out wild in the last few shorter tracks, but it would've helped the album if these shorter, weirder bits were more scattered around the album instead of lumped at the end.  Putting some of these unpredictable and shorter bits in with a bunch of silent pauses on,y made it less charming.  They should've been segues.

So in their efforts to remain a relevant death band, they put to much focus on the weirder bits and not enough on the actual point of their career: death metal.  So Heretic shows the band just putting out generic death metal and sticking weirder tracks on for the heck of it without organizing things or making the death metal rock.  It's raw heaviness brought down by riffs of either middling or decent quality and an unfocused teeter between laziness and ambition.  The long and short of it is simple.  The staggering potential of this album by evolution revolutionaries is both untamed and untapped.

The Napalm Death legacy is a weird one in which people are constantly battling over which ND albums are the best because of the various sounds they've covered in different eras, save the experimental scene in which they produced subpar albums during the early 90's.  The 1980's and the 21st century are totally different stories where most of the wars take place.  Me, personally, can't stand the fact that it took Napalm Death more than 30 years to create an album up to my standard of fine making: Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism.  This album has death, blackened crust, metalcore, industrial and more.  The problem with ND albums is that they make 40-fifty minutes of the same song on each album, usually.  And it gets on my nerves.

This EP doesn't have any of that stuff to worry about.  This is the kind of album a deathgrind album should be, not close to an hour but short and powerful.  I admit, I might've liked it to be a little longer, but thanks to the 2.5 minute average of these six songs on this EP, none of the ideas overstay their welcome.  It must also be said that the production of this album is noisy and dirty, which brings out the most of the punk attitude and the metallic vibes.  This helps make this one of their heaviest releases.  I love the fact that the percussion is so powerful on this album.  I mean, on Harmony Corruption, they were so weak I wanted to puke.  And people actually like that album.  I guess if I had to pick a favorite track, it would be Walls of Confinement.  It displays everything the albums about, fast, mid-paced, violent, hardcore and metallic.

Sometimes, all you really need is a short burst of heaviness to keep you going.  You draw that out for too long and it loses its effect.  I mean, why not?  So many punk genres along with their metal mutants build themselves on the EP instead of the album.  This is more than welcome to me.  It's got the brutality of Suffocation's Human Waste, although it could have slightly better production as it drowns in its own noise sometimes.  But 90% of the time it's very clear what's going on.  And even if it gets noisy, that's when it becomes one of the heaviest releases in either punk or metal.  A lot of lengthy ND studio albums could take a few cues from this EP.  I mean, yeah, there isn't a lot of differentiation between tracks... but this is only fifteen minutes.  And honestly, I'd scold myself for being so obsessive over fifteen minutes.  After hearing so many samey deathgrind albums, the variety-cultist in me wants more, but the critic in me won't allow that to be considered a con.

One day, and industrial band said, "let's put a better scifi twist on it" and created cyber metal, a niche genre that no one has really made a pure artform yet, and way?  Because it has a tendency to be very trope riddled.  But the appeal of the genre is obvious: cyber metal is all about the scifi, and one of the best bands to recreate that "cyberpunk" feel is Sybreed.  It shines at full force on Antares, no star pun intended.

The album recreates scifi vibes beautifully.  It's like all at once I'm being dragged out into space, experimented on in a lab or having to deal with dystopian problems in a cyberpunk world.  The drama is there, but never played up too much.  We have plenty of room for serene and melodic moments to just drag you away into "a sea of nothingness."  Sometimes the atmosphere is Floydian.  As for my favorite aspect of this album, I'd say it's Nominet's melodic vocals.  His high and youthful pitch is just robotic enough for the cyber sound but powerful in its softness.  The guy also has some decent metalcore growls, occasionally going into Wayne Static territory, which is pleasing to me considering that Wayne's voice was the best part of Static-X.

Unfortunately, the same problem that takes over the vast majority of cyber metal (I've started many albums but haven't finished them because of this) is that all the songs are pretty much covering every layer of influence at one.  There's cyber, pure industrial, groove, djent, electronic and death here, but most of these songs are made up of multiple sections each covering one or two of these genres at once, so originality becomes repetitive.  There's a little differentiation between songs sometimes, like the shift from atmospheric serenity in isolate to the raspy djent of Dynamic.  But otherwise, the reliance on shifting the same genres becomes tiring by the end, despite the melodies and atmos still being good.

Although cyber metal is a genre yet to be mastered and perfected, the fans of this niche genre will still have Sybreed and Antares.  This has very heavy feeling to it, which is the most powerful aspect of the album and the standout as well.  If you want metal that will put you right into a scifi world, I can't think of a better album.

Nevermore are known for having a diverse range which can potentially attract a lot of different metal fans: heavy, prog, thrash, power, speed, etc.  Basically, they've made for themselves a style which stays honorable to a large sect of the metal world.  But does this mean that they always write the best songs for any one of these genres?  They're considered an essential band in 90's and 2000's metal, so let's see where this takes me.

Nevermore's "The Politics of Ecstacy" sees them expanding on the style they created with their self-titled debut, but with a stronger progressive edge.  This is one of those challenging albums where predictability of the structures and riffs themselves is largely absent.  Thanks to this and their very metallic sound, they live up to the multiple areas they've included in their personal style at the time, which often relies on all of the major components playing at the same time.  Coupled with the singer's strong and loud vocals, this is a very energetic album, even during the slower compositions.  The rest of the components pairing with prog also makes this a very accessible prog album, which isn't necessarily bad.  However, while these songs are all cool and easy to get behind, the actual riffs aren't the most imaginative.  We have fun rhythms throughout the whole album, but not a single one of them amazed me, and I didn't give any five stars to any of the tracks.

This is an easy band to enjoy thanks to their range and power, but they aren't the most amazing group of writers out there, or at least they weren't at the time of this album's release.  The strong points, however, greatly outweigh the album's weakness, so I would easily find myself recommending this band to anyone looking to get into more metal, especially if you're already a Dream Theater fan.

Immediately after the highly melodic, beautifully different but not-so-heavy Tales from the Thousand Lakes, Amorphis realized that for them to stand out, they needed to be different.  This time, they expanded on their sound and took on a few different directions.  Their finally truly death album, Elegy, would see them becoming the prog metal band they're known for being, and of course this would set the band up as one of the essentials of that genre.  This is the finally truly death metal album we got, and even then it bridges the boundaries very bravely, so be prepared.

With Tales, Amorphis took a folksy route, capturing some old mythical vibes in the format of a death metal album.  Like that album, however, this band needs a little work in the heaviness department, as the drumming feels very weak and the lighthearted melodies overpower the extremity.  Unlike the last album, however, this takes folk influence to a much more surreal level, going into Arabic territory to create both desert vibes and adventurous cinematic touches.  Some of these psychedelic solos are very cool, and because of the Arabic vibes the folk metal influences bring in, they feel perfectly natural, adding to the unique behavior of this album.  We'll even have touches of prog electronic mingled in with our psychedelic solos on the third track, The Orphan.  Never would've seen a death metal act take a couple notes from Tangerine Dream, would you?  And thankfully, we do have a couple of heavier songs mixed in with this incredibly diverse bag of tricks, ones that never falter on the Arabic melodies.  Cares even gets pretty funky, and even has a short EDM mid-lude that fits the tone and presence of the song perfectly.

Now normally I would criticize a death metal band for feeling too commercial, even a melodeath band.  But Amorphis makes it work here because they've become a prog band with a plethora of influences that flow together with perfect consistency, like a good sangria and all its ingredients.  If only this album were heavier, I'd rank it among the ten greatest prog and or death metal albums I've ever heard, much like my feelings for the movie Southern Comfort and its lack of character development getting in the way of a top 10 slot on my movies list.  Elegy in an album that proves that Amorphis can pretty much do anything... except for be heavy enough to stand with heavier melodeath bands.

Amorphis was one of the first death metal bands I checked out, largely due to having gone through many death metal lyrics to find cleaner bands.  It's been ages since I returned to this album, and that's mostly due to the fact that I was turned off by them when I realized they gave up the death in place of becoming a formulaic prog band.  I love prog metal, but I was using Amorphis to explore new territory, so since they were covering more familiar territory, I gave up on them.  But now that I'm on a death kick, I'm finally giving their second and third albums another go.

To me, melodeath is a good excuse fore a death band to steer towards outsider influences for variety, pizazz and thematic depth.  We get that with Tales from the Thousand Lakes.  The album makes a point of prioritizing a folksy, mythical and slightly medieval feel over the brutality and heaviness of death.  This gives the album a unique touch for the early days of melodeath, and helped the genre overall.  This also gives the album a reason to be catchy and accessible without falling into radio behavior like Dark Tranquillity eventually did.  Unfortunately, this is also a hinderance to the album's overall extremity.  Our fantasy vibe here might appeal to fans of mythical music, but I can understand why some death fans would be turned off by this when they want their death metal blasting like hell, which is something melodeath bands can also do, like Edge of Sanity.

Anyway, this album has a lot of good about it in the creativity department, and because of that it'll always stand out as a stepping stone in the early development of melodeath.  But it needs to be heavier, so it's definitely not perfect.  But if you like melodic metal in general, then I will easily recommend this, even more so as an introductory album into death metal for the uninitiated.

While djent band Meshuggah is cool and all, and they've got an excellent vibe and a knack for riffs, damn do they beat the same basic principle to DEATH DEATH DEATH.  I mean, these guys invented a genre, and their album Destroy Erase Improve covers a few different metal genres and it all feels like it belongs together.  So why the hell can't they ever expand their horizons?  Meshuggah has become a one trick pony because frontman Fredrik Thordendal found a "formula" that "works" for his niche fanbase.

This guy might not seem so creative at a first glance, but before Meshuggah stuck to that formula like a bad habit, Thordendal created one of the most experimental and innovative metal albums of the modern age.  And guess what?  It's DJENT.  It's one of the most angular and wacky albums out there, but everything is taken super seriously.  The album has crushing progressive riffs flowing naturally into the calmer cooler djent which ALSO flow naturally into crazy jazz and free improv.  By connecting the "like elements" of each genre, the three are piecing each other together flawlessly, and the result is an extremely trippy journey into the wild world of prog, crazy enough to rival King Crimson.  This is what djent is supposed to sound like, and it's a shame we may never see something like this from Fredrik Thordendal again, especially not from his formulaic metal band.

Dark Tranquillity were the first melodeath band I ever checked out, and of course, it was such a new experience for me that I had learned to love them.  However, as I checked out more tech and brutal death, I eventually fell out of favor with melodeath, so it's been a while since I checked out DT.  Damage Done is considered as essential to death metal as The Gallery, but while The Gallery is a great album on its own, it doesn't hold up as well for me anymore.  Will the same be true for Damage Done?

I admit, this is pretty enjoyable.  It's got its catchiness about it, and because of its accessibility it makes for a great entrypoint into death metal in general.  To be honest, this would likely be the first or second death metal album I'd recommend because of that.  It also has great production working for each song.  Unfortunately, it's a little TOO accessible and not that varied, so all the songs mold with each other to the point where, even though it's obviously death, it has the same vibe as bands like Born of osiris and As I Lay Dying, modern-day alternative-structured metalcore bands that just want to get a few singles out.  So while this is obviously a good album, it doesn't hold up as well once you expose yourself to much more true death metal.  Even other melodeath bands like Edge of Sanity and In Flames don't go THIS radio.

Until the apocalypse, there will be bands knocking off Cryptopsy and Suffocation, an unspoken genre you could call "brutal tech death."  Many of these albums have a tendency to sound like the knockoffs, save a few key bands like the Egyptian-oriented Nile, or the short and sweet band that's always changing their sound a little: Defeated Sanity.  A couple years ago I blew through all the Defeated Sanity albums just to get through another brutal death band.  The last of these was The Sanguinary Impetus, and by that point I must've been a little burnt out on brutal death because I only gave it an 8.5.

Now the band has had 27 years of experience when this was recorded, and it shows.  Our drummer, Lille Gruber, has been going about this career since the age of 11, and the practice has payed off.  He's able to create the mania of the album and keep it up throughout.  And all the while, the band is maintaining the strongest sense of insanity they've ever had, even more so than the much more avant-garde Psalms of the Moribund.  This keeps the album unpredictable and shocking until the end, even if you've technically heard the tricks before.  The glory of it is the randomness of it all feeling so utterly consistent that it largely overcomes its monotony by being to wild and wacky.  Despite the wackiness, there's a deep seriousness involved in the songwriting that lets you know that the band is trying harder than they've ever done.  In fact, because the distinct sound of the album doesn't overstay its welcome, the last two tracks are likely the best due to maintaining its unpredictable approach with stronger effect.

The Sanguinary Impetus is a modern death classic that does pure justice to a genre that's been beaten like a decomposed horse already pushing daisies.  There's hope for the genre as long as bands like Defeated Sanity focus as much on depth as brutality, and this is one of the heaviest death albums of the 2020's.

When I checked out the Obituary debut, Slowly We Rot, I noticed its many facets pretty quickly and was impressed with the band's stylistic range, even if many of the same songs took from the same influences.  I wasn't quite as impressed with that album as others, although I still liked it.  But I've been aware of their sophomore's status as a die hard classic of the death scene for a while.  Basically, if there was a Big Four of Floridian Death Metal, Obituary would've cemented themselves as one of them with this album alone, considering the reputation it gets.  So with everyone hyping it up, I was really hoping this album would live up to that hype.

It comes as no surprise that the album is much doomier and slower at times.  This not only sets this album apart from the majority of other OSDM bands, but is a perfect stylistic choice to expand upon Obituary's special brand of "evil" that they built there early careers on.  And this evil isn't one of those interesting little treats that wears out its welcome by the end.  It stays strong and even scary throughout the whole.  This also means that with the doom persona expanded, the thrash of the debut is given little to no attention.  I'd say that despite the further lack of variety this decision entails, it was for the best because the end result was stronger personality.  And without the thrash, this also means that the scariness is replacing the sleaziness of the debut, which means Obituary can also shift their personalities easily depending on the direction they take.  This is a special trait that may go over people's heads if they hear this before the debut.  Maybe this aspect came from hiring Death's guitarist, James Murphy?  Whatever it was, it certainly did this album a unique justice.  And thanks to the abundance of doominess, extremely speedy tracks like the 2:40 Find the Arise come as shocks to the system.  And whenever we get a doomy, ambient sound effect beginning a song or somewhere in the middle of one, there's just this weird blend of gothic terror and total tranquility that comes from it.  These effects might not have had such a strong effect if the band's performances didn't have so dark of a personality.

If only just once, Obituary nearly perfected their craft.  What we have hear is an album that, while still doom-focused, recreates heaviness in a number of forms working together to tell a deathly horror story through riffs and monstrous vocals.  This is miles ahead of the debut, as this isn't just some guitar-driven riff fest.  This is a death metal album that's all atmosphere all the time.  The improvement over Slowly We Rot of its artistic maturity is staggering.  I've heard quite a few slow and doomy death bands (not death doom metal), and none of them are as horrifying as this.