(This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the first Part of a four-Part collection of reviews, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before.)
Every year we do this; the final clearing of the slate before the annual list-making season begins. This year will be no different, because like every other year, I’m also opening this with an apology to the bands included.
Normally my reviews tend to be long-winded and wordy as can get because I enjoy the long-form dissection of an album – no matter how repetitive in my choice of phrases as I may get – and the final clearing tends to be shorter. It was my intent not to do so this year but life happened.
Not only that, life happened hard and life happened in such a way that I’m going to have a very, very difficult time talking about it for a long time and I’m not entirely convinced that we’ll ever be any definition of ‘okay’ again around here, so much as we are just getting by and in a permanent state of ‘recovering’. It’s been tough.
But, I haven’t forgotten about this because as much as we’ve spoken about how life and work kick our asses and the website takes a backseat, this is one of my few outlets. As a result, I’m not sure if I have it in me to do my usual end of the year clusterfuck – though I will try – but I do want to at least get some words out about the last remaining groups of releases that have haunted my ‘to review’ notes over the year.
These will likely be a hell of a lot shorter than expected; much akin to a smaller blurb found in a print magazine than our usual deep dive. So in that sense I do apologize, especially to those that’ve been in the queue a whole hell of a lot longer than they ever should’ve been – unless I discovered the album super late.
This’ll probably read like someone trying to describe the snow pack on the side of a mountain while in the midst of being thrown off of it by an avalanche, but in more ways than one, this’ll also likely serve as an exorcism and that’ll be the way it comes out.
THE BREATHING PROCESS – TODESKRONE
It’s not surprising that The Breathing Process have adopted the low-and-slow earth-heaving sound that they do for about half of their latest release Todeskrone. It seems like a logical progression from songs like “Wilt”, “Shadow Self”, and “Terminal” from their full length Labyrinthian before it. What is surprising is seeing The Breathing Process return with new material so soon after that release in late 2021.
Granted, it’s only four songs but still, there’re some sizable gaps in the group’s discography and they’re a band whose music, for as straightforward as it seems on first approach, is surprisingly dense at times. They are long-practiced in the art of the -core and they were part of the initial purveyors of the hybridized symphonic death and black metal sound. It’s just that, for them, the rest of the genre had to catch up in a way, and likewise, The Breathing Process also metamorphosed into their current form with the band lining up right alongside the more popular groups of current times.
As a four-banger, Todeskrone doesn’t see The Breathing Process straying too far from the foundation they laid for much of Labyrinthian. All four songs are absolute bruisers, refined in some ways and condensed in others. While Labyrinthian allowed The Breathing Process room to expand and go in a few different directions – “Atlas” for instance being an album highlight yet standing in contrast to the groovier early-highlight “Shadow Self” – Todeskrone is more laser-focused and keeps it that way for the twenty or so minutes it asks.
It allows vocalist Chris Rabideau to dive deeper into his role as chief monster-noise-maker – though the rest of the band seem to step in behind for a multi-layered vocal attack at times, and songs like “Empty, Not Alone” and “Clawed” were worthy of being the marquee noise-makers unleashed ahead of the full EP. Though, when The Breathing Process do lean on the epic embellishments that they made their name with in the past in the title song, there is a sense that when they want to – rather than pile-driving the listener further and further into the ground – they can still fill a cathedral hall full of sound despite being just a compact group of humans.
It’s a promising look at where The Breathing Process are currently and it feels good to hear them still knocking down buildings on a somewhat more reasonable schedule.
https://uniqueleaderrecords.bandcamp.com/album/todeskrone
https://www.facebook.com/thebreathingprocessusa
BERZERKER LEGION – CHAOS WILL REIGN
Three years later and the marauding hordes of Berzerker Legion return once again for another ten songs of remarkably straight-shooting and rampaging melodeath that is plenty worthy to serve as red meat for genre lovers.
You’ll recognize the sandbox Berzerker Legion are playing in almost immediately, and to be honest with you, they’re taking a very “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach in their sophomore album. If you liked what Berzerker Legion were up to on Obliterate The Weak then you’re going to like what the band are up to on Chaos Will Reign. The lineup: unchanged; the song formula: unchanged; and the number of songs per album: also unchanged. Berzeker Legion know exactly what makes the machine roar and they’re going to stick to it.
You’ll find plenty to headbang along to on this album and once again the tempo remains pretty high throughout. The first three songs are purpose-built to make sure that a listener locks in right from the start and they’re all impressively fast, finally sealing the deal with the third song “Nihilism Over Empathy”, which is one of the sneakier earworms on Chaos Will Reign. The apocalyptic heaviness of “Towards Oblivion” following is the first time where events actually slow down a bit – though not for drummer James Stewart, who still has to double-bass gallop until the end of time during that song.
Berzerker Legion are terrifyingly good at their particular brand of death metal. They stand toe-to-toe with their contemporaries at every turn and at times even outclass them in a few cases. They don’t push on any walls or try to redraw any particular boundaries, instead hewing close enough to the galloping-horde blueprint that their band name becomes oddly befitting.
Chaos Will Reign is a beefy album for sure, built mostly out of opportunities for listeners to circle-pit, vocalist Jonny Pettersson to play roaring maestro over the top of it, and the string-weilders to shred their axes in turn. Its fifty minutes of white-knuckled galloping metal, and an album that maintains Berzeker Legion as one of the most sniper-precise straight-shooting death metal acts out there.
https://listenable-records.bandcamp.com/album/chaos-will-reign
https://www.facebook.com/berzerkerlegion
COSMITORIUM – BROKEN ARCHETYPES
The winding halls of the tech-death monolith added another name to its ever-increasing and intricate construction in the form of Broken Archetypes, the first full-length release from the group Cosmitorium. Bounding between genre-tags like a gymnast moving at hyperspeed, Cosmitorium wind and twist their way through seven dense compositions that could see the band branded with the progressive death, tech-death, and -core tags all with equal aplomb, and none sticking that well simply because Cosmitorium are having too much fun dashing around within each song to be pinned down to one particular style.
Thus they join the ranks of the hybridizers and mutators of the world, flinging the alien and otherworldly into an already packed musical stew that is as reflective of their ambitions as it is their sense of the grandiose. If nothing else you couldn’t fault Cosmitorium for shooting for the stars here because across seven songs they leave near-nothing behind, and take plenty of time to flex that instrumental-prodigy muscle that has damn near become a requirement in order to even enter the ring to swing a few punches in this particular genre-fight.
Surprisingly, in spite of how large Cosmitorium come off across the seven songs here, the band do keep things relatively compact, rarely sniffing outside of a four-to-six-minute comfort zone. There’s a few epics and roller-coasters in there, like the expansive “Space Snakes” that closes out the affair or the worming block of “Peak And Surrender”, but otherwise if you like a good sci-fi bend that organically grows around the edges of the album verses being brad-nailed right onto the side of it, then Cosmitorium work very hard on Broken Archetypes in service of that overall mission.
On the scales of the brutally-heavy it’s obvious that Cosmitorium stray toward the lighter side, but that’s more because you get the impression on songs like “Incinerator”, “Dimensions”, and opener “Cosmic Dawn” that the band fashion themselves more as a sharpened knife than an overall bludgeoning hammer.
They pull from the bucket of genre-tropes as well as anyone else, as well as stretching into further bounds in order to distinguish themselves. Broken Archetypes is a concrete-solid foundation of an album for the early goings of this mostly Californian crew and an impressive example of death metal when it isn’t spending its entirety – just sometimes since it is fun – going at lightspeed.
https://cosmitorium.bandcamp.com/album/broken-archetypes
https://www.facebook.com/cosmitorium
THE RITUAL AURA – HERESIARCH
Even though the gaps between albums for multinational tech-death act The Ritual Aura aren’t actually that bad when averaged out, the wait betwen releases for this band tend to feel like an eternity. Part of this feeling could be credited to the fact that since the group’s 2016 release Taether, their albums could be world-title contenders for being the most packed-to-the-gills albums out there, as The Ritual Aura try many-a-different thing to distinguish themselves from an increasingly packed crowd.
They’re one of the few bands out there where you could declare every one of their full-length releases distinctly different from the one prior to it, and only part of that is due to the band’s ever-shifting lineup over the course of its career. The group’s newest album Heresiarch – released in early November via The Artisan Era – has two new members taking over the bassist and vocalist positions, with drummer KC Brand moving into a full-time slot after having done session work on 2019’s Velothi.
The Ritual Aura are exceedingly ambitious and have made it a hallmark of their career. They’re plenty good at the ‘dangle shiny keys in front of listeners’ style of tech-death, but as of recent years haven’t been too keen on the full-bore velocity worship, favoring the writhing stylings of a much more crafted composition.
It won’t shock listeners to learn that the band have once again bounced back to the lengthier side of things after having an album prior to it keep to a pretty neat half-hour. There’re plenty of multi-part songs this time around and song-lengths vary wildly – some interstitial, some full-bore epics – and they collectively find the band providing Heresiarch with a smidge over fifty minutes of music.
Of course, they also call in a ton of reinforcements throughout the album, including a lot of the names there were involved in making the Morrorwind-mythos-inspired Velothi. The credits for Hereisiarch read like a who’s who of the modern tech-death scene, and it won’t surprise to see a few names from the overall Artisan Era roster entwined with this album as well. Given the album concept of Heresiarch pulling from Warcraft mythos it’s safe to say that The Ritual Aura will continue to remain equally as nerdy as they’ve been in the past.
The Ritual Aura wander through many grounds on Heresiarch and put in an impressive effort to keep songs from blurring too hard into one another. There’re points where they’re supposed to, as they continue one long, overarching narrative, and the band aren’t too prone to make things easy-going otherwise.
It’s impressive how often they take a lesser-trodden path simply to avoid pulling from the overall tech-death-trope hat too often. It’s not an immediate ‘seize you by the throat and hold you in place’ style of album. The Ritual Aura have written an expansive work that is worth exploring instead, even as it feels like it is taking its own time wandering from point to point, bass part to fretless bass part. It is an album that is as interesting as it is heavy, more groove-focused than the band have been in the past, and expounding upon many of the ideas The Ritual Aura had on the album prior to it.
https://theritualaura.bandcamp.com/album/heresiarch
http://www.facebook.com/theritualaura