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My Dying Bride - For Lies I Sire
(Peaceville) Review by
Chris Davison |
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Much like Yorkshire pudding, morbid obesity and race riots,
My Dying Bride have become something of a northern
tradition. Single handedly inspiring one in every three
Russian metal heads into becoming sound-a-likes, it has been
some time since the last MDB opus. “A Line of Deathless
Kings” wasn't their strongest release, to be honest, and
thus it was a little trepidation that I put “For Lies I
Sire” onto my stereogram. Turns out, I needn't have worried.
Put simply, this is the most infectious, memorable piece of
miserable bastardry revealed since the mighty “Like Gods of
the Sun” album, a personal favourite of mine. It's quite
hard |
to pinpoint just what exactly is different here, in some
respects. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the band have
recruited a bona fide violin player again. I really can't
overstate how much a real violinist assists proceedings;
it's a gentle, mournful sound that contrasts beautifully
against the more abrasive guitar and bass sounds. Keyboards
are all very well, but they never really capture the
fragility and vulnerability of the strings. From the opening
strains of “My Body, A Funeral”, you get the image that this
is My Dying Bride once again at the height of their powers.
There are the naysayers, of course, who will say that
nothing since “Turn Loose the Swans” has been worth
listening to, but to be honest these people are dullards.
“Fall With Me” is an exercise in dynamics – part funereal
dirge, part martial stomp, and a perfect illustration of My
Dying Bride circa 2009 – the marriage of the extreme and the
emotional in one package.
While “A Line of Deathless Kings” was perhaps guilty of
being unfocused and in some respects had some filler tracks
nestling on there along with the more competent tracks, “For
Lies I Sire” has been perfectly honed. The songwriting on
display here is seldom anything other than breathtaking.
Aaron (for the main) sings with his clean vocals, but
occasionally he lets rip in his full throated deathly roar,
to great effect. Elsewhere, Andrew and Hamish continue to
lay claim to their right to be seen as the Murray and Smith
of doom metal, trading ominous tones and downbeat riffs like
they were free. This line up, I can only hope, will
eventually be seen as the definitive My Dying Bride team.
Nine despondent hymns delivered in just shy of an hour, this
places the band on a pedestal that no one else in this field
of death-inflected gothic doom can touch. To try and
imitate this band now would just seem pointless. A band
reborn? Accept no substitutes. Majestic, breathtaking and
overwhelmingly gloomy, this is despair made flesh...but
without despair there is no hope. A brilliant album, and
certainly in the running for best album of the year.
www.mydyingbride.org |
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Obscura - Cosmogenesis
(Relapse Records)
By: Dave Schalek |
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All you really need to know is the band name, and you pretty
much know what you’re in for with “Cosmogenesis” by Obscura.
Taking a classic, technical death metal album title as your
band name immediately pigeonholes you as a band, and,
frankly, you had better live up to it. In addition, Obscura
sports alumni from Pestilence and Necrophagist, undoubtedly
the kings of technical death metal, so you know that you’re
in for, at least, a technical tour-de-force with “Cosmogenesis”.
“Cosmogenesis” is this German outfit’s second full-length
and first with giant Relapse Records.
Technical death metal is fast becoming an oversaturated
genre with even once simply brutal |
death metal bands, such as Deeds Of Flesh among others,
jumping on the bandwagon and eschewing the brutality for a
more technical approach. Couple this trend with one band
after another releasing technically proficient albums of
late, and Obscura can get
lost in the shuffle really quick, illustrious alumni
notwithstanding.
Make no mistake; the technical virtuosity that you would
expect from Obscura is present in spades on “Cosmogenesis”,
thereby solidifying the band’s credentials. What immediately
stands out is the fluid bass work of Jeroen Paul Thesseling
(formerly of Pestilence). Working with a six string bass,
Thesseling’s virtuosity is immediately reminiscent of Steve
DiGiorgio’s work on “Human” and “Individual Thought
Patterns”. Thesseling’s work provides the backbone for much
of “Cosmogenesis”, as the rest of the album comes across as
an amalgamation of Necrophagist, mid-period Death, and the
current version of Cynic, albeit with a great deal more
metallic heft.
You can probably gather from this review that “Cosmogenesis”
is going to be highly appealing to technical musicians and
aficionados with a penchant for the technical death metal
genre. For the fan with a casual interest, if you were
somewhat disappointed with “Traced In Air” as being too far
removed from metal, but admire the sheer musicianship of
Paul Masvidal and company, then you’ll find much to like in
Obscura.
www.myspace.com/realmofobscura
| www.relapse.com |
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Opaque Lucidity - Opaque Lucidity
(BadMoodMan Music) Review by Steve Green |
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The misery is coming thick and fast, (or should that be thick and slow?)
as we have another slab of atmospheric Funeral Doom, this time from
Russia, with Opaque Lucidity, which features members of both Aglaomorpha
and Risus Sardonicus.
This, their debut album, consists of 4 tracks, which average out at just
over 10 minutes each. At times the album is completely stripped back to a
thin layer of atmospheric keyboards and a desolate, despairing growled
vocal. To some this might not be the most pleasant aural experience
they'll ever encounter, but to me, this is a thing of beauty.
Minimalist ambience that's just about as beautiful as it gets, although
the same cannot be |
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said for the vocals, which sound like they're from some of
the scarier moments from Resident Evil 4 (the bit in the
sewer where the large parasites attack you). The two
contrasting styles work very well together and this album
comes very highly recommended, as do most releases from
Solitude Productions and its sub-label BadMoodMan Music.
www.solitude-prod.com |
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Pestilence - Resurrection Macabre
(Mascot) Review by James
Young |
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Any fan of extreme metal was no doubt delighted to hear that
Pestilence reformed last year, and the news that they were
going to release a new album certainly caused much
anticipation. For those who didn’t know, Holland’s
Pestilence were extremely influential in the 80s thrash
scene, as the presence of the token ‘guy with a Consuming
Impulse’ shirt at every thrash metal gig attests. They then
turned at the turn of the decade into a death metal outfit
to widespread acclaim, and then with 1993’s Spheres became a
technical progressive band which polarised their fan base.
The three grunts which lead into a blasting frenzy in opener
‘Devouring Frenzy’ tell us that this is quite a far cry from
Spheres, but |
rather rooted quite firmly in their Testimony Of The
Ancients death metal era. This might come as a relief to
some, but to others (such as myself), it seems like a bit of
a regression. Where this album does impress however is in
its bludgeoning sound, and as death metal goes, this is
pretty first-class stuff. Perfect production lends an extra
glistening edge to the buzzsaw-like guitars and hammering
drums; the riffs of Patrick Mameli and Patrick Uterwijk are
so commanding that there’s almost an industrial solidity to
the sound, which would make you think that the band had
never been away.
Just because this is by all intents and purposes a death
metal album, there is still a great display of musicianship
here, and whilst some of the songs can sound deceivingly
simple, like ‘Fiend’, there are some underlying winding time
signatures, with some very fiddly bass plucking courtesy of
one of the best in the business, Tony Choy. Likewise,
‘Synthetic Grotesque’ and ‘Hangman’ contain some great
standout bass lines as well as some discordant chords which
you would not expect to find on your average death metal
album. Mameli’s vocals also shine, exhibiting a very strong
grunt which harks back not only to mid-era Pestilence, but
also reminds one of the violence-inducing evilness of Morbid
Angel. Another new concept to Pestilence is that of blast
beating - Peter Wildoer has the gift of the gab when it
comes to hammering the bass drums, but now we have some true
light-speed blasting too, which somehow increases the
already maxed-out intensity levels. For the old-school fans,
there’s a song called ‘Dehydrated II’, which is as
thrashingly devastating as the original, as well as three
straight-up re-recorded versions of ‘Chemo Therapy’, ‘Out Of
The Body’, and ‘Lost Souls’ as bonus tracks.
Whilst it’s a bit frustrating that this is clearly a
throwback to the golden age of the band, and doesn’t really
move things on a great deal, it’s hard to deny the sheer
excellence of this album. This is a death metal clinic -
perfect sound, superb musicianship, and top-notch
song-writing. Pestilences tend to recur, and how grateful we
can be that this one has returned!
www.pestilence.nl |
www.myspace.com/pestilenceofficial
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www.mascotrecords.com |
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Primordial - Imrama
Re-issue (Metal
Blade) Review by Chris Davison |
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I must confess, I have been a latecomer to the Primordial
party. I joined with the release of 2005's “The Nameless
Dead”, and I haven't looked back. They really stand alone in
the the intelligent marriage of post-black metal, epic doom
and folk hybrid metal. It's cool, therefore, for Metal Blade
to finally re-release this, their debut album and demo from
back in 1995. I haven't been able to get a hold of this in
shops or mail order, not even the Karmaggedon Media
reissue.
Well, it's...interesting to see where they have come from.
Of course, it's easy to be a snide, guffawing hack when
given the benefit of hindsight and listening to the
earliest, primitive |
outpourings of a nascent band. In a nutshell, this is very
much more possessed of a black metal essence, positively
dripping in that second wave of Norwegian black metal sound
that was so popular back around the time
that this modest release was first recorded. The treble
heavy riffs, the shrieked vocals that bring to mind Ihsahn
of the same period and the almost naïve construction of many
of the songs, but for all that, the seeds of future
greatness are certainly here to be heard. On the likes of
“Here I Am King”, you can hear the Celtic flourishes among
the more ordinary black metal screams, and the almost Thin
Lizzy-esque bass lines thundering underneath the musical
maelstrom. There are also plenty of tasteful, clean vocals
here as well, which although the norm now, was incredibly
rare back then in a work as extreme as this. Even on the
four demo tracks, recorded back in 2003, this is a band far
more interesting than their peers. Yes, it's pretty raw and
crude, but there is an intelligence to the music that belies
the youth of the band at this point.
It's tempting of course to take the piss out of the
production, but given that it apparently cost the slight sum
of £2500 and was using primitive equipment, the album sounds
pretty damned good, and of course being “of its time” and
adopted genre, the raw sound was definitely “in”. All in all
then, an interesting release in terms of seeing where they
came from, but being pretty much unimpressed with 99% of all
black metal, more essential to me as a piece of history than
as a piece of music in its own right. You may not think so,
and certainly it's still better than most of the weakly
produced bollocks that called itself black metal in '95. A
nice collectors album, but I wouldn't spend my last penny on
it.
www.primordialweb.com |
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Quest For Fire -Self
Titled (TeePee) By Metal Mark |
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When I think of Quest For Fire, I think of the 1982 caveman
epic with Ron Pearlman and the Maiden song from their
wonderful "Piece of Mind" album in 1983. However this band
is certainly removed from Maiden and that movie. Like most
of the other recent releases from TeePee records (Black Math
Horseman, Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound) this is heavy
psychedelic rock with elements of space rock and early metal
as well. Think of a blending of Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Black
Sabbath, Deep Purple and even the Doors and you get an idea
of where this band is coming from. There are plenty long
rambling passages of mind numbing sound, but this isn't
trippy music because there is a definite dark |
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presence to many of the songs as well. Quest For Fire
approach their songs with subtle hand, but they are not
afraid to go against the grain and pull in unnerving tones
and sounds. This is one of the albums that requires you turn
off any outside distractions and really focus in all of your
senses on what is going on so you don't miss anything. If
you do then you will be rewarded because there are many
moments where just churn layers of thick, flowing riffs and
mesmerizing vocals. There are six tracks with a running time
around forty-five minutes, but somehow it seemed a little
longer. The one shortcoming about Quest For Fire is that as
they went on, I expected them to expand their sound and
become more involved. They did to an extent, but I don't
they pushed enough or took some chances that would have
helped this disc to be even better. Still, a powerful effort
and another feather in the cap for TeePee records as the fours
albums I have heard from them in 2009 have all been very
good or even better.
www.myspace.com/questforfireband
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Vinterriket - Zeit-Los:Laut-Los
(BadMoodMan Music) Review by Steve Green |
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I was a touch indifferent towards the last Vinterriket album, Kaelte,
Schnee Und Eis, which took an age to (semi) win me over, but there are no
such problems this time around, with Zeit-Los: Laut-Los, which consists of
a single, sprawling 40 minute track of blissful ambience..
On the last album I compared Vinterreket,
aka Christoph Ziegler to a poor mans Summoning, this time around the music
is much more ambient in texture and is more comparable to say Wongraven or
the more ambient side of Burzum, although unfortunately it isn't in the
same league as either band/project. Mainly as there isn't enough
variation in |
the songs long duration. But that's not to say that it isn't
a decent album. It's just that Mr Ziegler is a tad on the prolific
side, issuing about 50 different releases in the past
decade, so with that number of albums and split cds forever
getting released, the quality is never going to be as high
as you'd hope.
So despite this album not setting the world alight, it's still a good
album of brooding ambience and one I'll definitely play in my more calmer
moments.
www.solitude-prod.com |
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