(DGR finally caught up with reviewing the new album by Stortregn, and one reason you can guess at is that it’s probably going to appear again on his NCS year-end list. That’s our bet at least.)
You probably noticed this before I did, but a glance at the calendar in this clusterfuck of a year showed that it had suddenly because November. Traditionally – and there are a few traditions that even us heretics in this corner of the interweb observe – November is something of a ‘panic month’, wherein not only do you have your new releases, but you also have people – like our own Austin Weber recently – who are desperately trying to play catch-up with albums that have come out throughout the year.
This writer does the same of course and with similar purpose, because there are albums that for one reason or another didn’t get covered or ones that we’ve discovered while burying our nose in the tree roots and sniffing around the dirt, or the more personal one: to introduce people to an album now so that when it starts popping up within people’s year-end collections they won’t suddenly be taken aback by a release that has had fuck-all coverage on a site now praising it as one of the best of the year.
It’s a compulsion to complete a narrative arc, and I have that sense that Stortregn‘s Finitude may actually dark-horse its way into a few people’s year-end collectives. A bigger part of that story may be how it will likely find a place somewhere in the year-end celebration we throw around here, because Finitude is a very fine distillation of the tech-death genre as a whole, and the one that these Swiss madmen have created here is one that will surprise people – even when you can recognize many of its component parts.
By and large, the musical organic being that is now recognized as the tech-death genre has split into a handful of directions, and most of it seems to have coalesced around two particular labels. While they’ve certainly changed motivations over time, at the moment it seems like two of the houses where you can see a label and have a general idea of what a group does, sight unseen (or sound unheard) are Unique Leader and The Artisan Era.
Over the years their focus points have changed. Unique Leader has often cast its eye in the way of brutal-death and slam bands, while recently embracing a lot of the slower and more symphonics-based deathcore groups – given the shared roots that many of the aforementioned have, it seems like a logical lateral – and The Artisan Era have run with much of what their standard-bearer Inferi have long built their musical career out of, hyper-fast guitar pyrotechnics and the sort of velocity-driven songwriting to match.
Stortregn, then, have an interesting position in play here, as their newest release Finitude is their second album for The Artisan Era but their sixth overall, showing that the band have long had the chops to stick around in today’s modern metal scene. Finitude continues what the band started on Impermanence a few years back: Hybridizing so many genres that it might just be easier to throw a dictionary in a blender and use what comes out than try to make picks about each individual segment, and then playing it as fast as they possibly could.
Much like Impermanence before it, characterizing Stortregn‘s newest release Finitude is difficult. It is, like so many of its peers, a massive sponge of influences and styles that have flashpointed, whipsawed, and been thrown through the ringer of the tech-death world over the past few years. Compositionally, it is fascinating given that Stortregn pull from so many directions that the whole album doesn’t just come across as a gigantic amorphous splattering. Instead, every song flows rather well, and though all of them are delivered at rapid enough pace to strip the numbering off the side of a race car, you quickly get used to the band’s chosen pacing, and soon enough Stortregn will have blasted their way through forty-three minutes of Finitude before you know it.
There’s only eight songs within the boundaries of this release and you likely know where that’s headed, because Stortregn beat the word ‘subtlety’ to death with a cinder block a long time ago. These are songs that are stuffed full, and trying to hold on to any particular guitar lead on the first go of an album like this is almost a fool’s errand, given that Stortregn will likely cycle back around to it anyway after taking a massive journey in several directions beforehand. It leads to incredible moments within particular songs though, and just as many times where the second, third, and fourth listens to Finitude are going to yield different discoveries each time and new moments to come back to.
Given its prominence as both lead single and music video, it probably goes without saying that the song “Xeno Chaos” is incredible. If anything, that song appearing so early in the tracklist may be doing Finitude a bit of a disservice because it is the song where Stortregn really plant a flag in regards to what Finitude is going to be as an album.
The first two songs of Finitude firmly establish Stortregn as being a band perfectly suited for the current slate of Artisan Era bands. They are blindingly fast, seek to tell an epic story of alien battles and invasions, and have enough instrumental pyrotechnics to make any ‘why how come skateboarding can’t be big ramp all the time?’ moron like yours truly happy. Opener “Finitude” is not just a massive symphonics-laden intro track leading into the first proper song, it’s also where Stortregn lay down the foundation of Finitude as an album, though “A Lost Battle Rages On” following seems more tradionally in line with Stortregn‘s graduating class of hyper-blasters.
Plenty of high vocal shrieking abounds and guitar shredding to the point of those instruments becoming confetti lay within the first two songs alone, and once that groundwork is laid, then you get the dynamic world of “Xeno Chaos” – a song dedicated so much to taking a journey that by the time you reach the acoustic guitar playing there isn’t a blink at it. It just feels like it belongs because it is carrying the melody of the main guitar lead that opened the song. The way that song loops back around and around like a gymnast mid-routine is fascinating and may be the first big wall people have to climb over to get to the rest of Finitude because the temptating to constantly repeat is always going to be there.
“Rise Of The Insidious” at first seems like it is going to be that aforementioned wall, given that it sails well over the six-minute mark, yet in the world of Finitude it isn’t. If anything “Rise Of The Insidious” is the song that during its first couple of minutes is the time where it seems like Stortregn dial it back a bit. You’re still in familiar wall-of-guitar lead territory, buttressed with plenty of high screams and enough drumming to drive deep into the Earth, yet – and much like “Xeno Chaos” once that element has been introduced – Stortregn dive back and forth between acoustic guitar breaks and showing off technical profiency with their instruments.
It’s been a trend for a handful of years now but any time you let the bassist get a chance to smash out a segment just as quickly as the guitarists do – like in the opening one, two, three punch of this particular song – and then later go for a full solo segment to close out, it’s always appreciated. Yes, much of the genre as a whole is lighting off a firework and gaining joy out of watching it squeal before launching into the sky and accidentally igniting your neighbor’s tree because the bottle you stood it in fell over, but ‘Rise Of The Insidious” doing the technical showpiece work at the mid-point of the album is an interesting path to chart. The songs, understandably, get shorter from there: once the “Rise Of The Insidious” mountain has been climbed, then the rest of the album is about the rapid descent.
Three more songs of impressive showmanship send out the world of Finitude. “Omega Axiom” welcomes the second wave of this release with a crashing opening before becoming one of the standards of the album, and from there Stortregn build back up again. Finitude always remains at neck-breaking pace so while the album is done with a constant build up wall, collapse wall, build up again dynamic, Stortregn are blinding in how quickly everything moves.
Much of what Finitude is constructed of is going to be familiar to tech-death followers, yet somehow Stortregn take those pieces and make entirely new construction out of it. They aren’t the first band to use a lot of these elements yet they’ve done an incredible job of taking them into their formula of ‘whirling maelstrom’ and making it sound as if it’s always belonged, as if it was their own to begin with. Nothing feels like it is being just jammed in there for the sake of saying that they did it, and they aren’t throwing the latest trend as a layer ‘on top of the usual’ just to keep up with everyone around them.
Finitude takes all much of the tech-death landscape and makes a well-constructed and fully built monument of its own. Stortregn masterfully follow and refine upon the groundwork of a whole genre, and because of that Finitude is fascinating. It’s hard not to get sucked into the disc and continually stumble upon different things that will strike your fancy and it is likely it will pop up again before year’s end for that reason.
https://stortregn.bandcamp.com/album/finitude
https://www.facebook.com/Stortregn/