SERENITY IN MURDER: “TIMELESS REVERIE”

(Serenity in Murder‘s Timeless Reverie has been out since the end of February on Apostasy Records, but it won’t let go of DGR, and so even now he feels compelled to sing its praises.)

One of the joys of being an internet dork such as we are is that we get to witness regional scenes and tastes sprouting up across the world and then attempt to archive it. While the language barrier is always a little daunting, depending on the country, the need for loud aggression is more universal. It’s not surprising that the semi-permanent poverty and extreme artform of heavy metal has held appeal across the world in that regard.

Sometimes you need to just yell and share your band’s name with a Slayer song, and whatever gets filtered through that particular point in time is transformed based on the person’s ambition. It’s why you can have some of the most musically inclined and smartest people in the world playing essentially the dumbest fucking thing possible – either in an attempt to elevate the artform or the more commonly cited reason of “it’s just fun”.

Heavy metal’s creativity abounds across the planet and it’s interesting to see what gains traction where. One noticeable thing that has popped up over the years in regard to Japan is that they absolutely adore their guitar shred, and they enjoy a female screamer. Arch Enemy‘s years with Angela Gossow must’ve gone insanely well over there – considering that it’s also one of the places where the original original lineup of the band have toured as Book Of Black Earth – and must’ve lined up perfectly with Japan’s own aspirations for melodic extremity.

Serenity In Murder have been humming along for close to sixteen years now, steadily releasing albums as an undercurrent to the wider heavy metal scene – slowly honing their craft into a form that could currently be described as melodeath and outright extreme metal. Dancing on the line between the two with the practiced skill of an expert wire-walker is Serenity In Murder‘s current signal flare to the world, and their album Timeless Reverie makes sure you know it from the start.

There are veritable hordes of heavy metal groups out there for whom the “everything and the kitchen sink” method is a fun experiment for them to draw music from, and Serenity In Murder‘s latest tackles that challenge with aplomb. Whether it be some impressively shred-heavy guitar playing, backing orchestration for both heavy lifting on the melody front and oversized bombast, rhythmic blending of many a different ground-punching segment, or wall-to-wall vocal work in both clean sung and teeth-bared form, Timeless Reverie is an album with a lot on offer and forty-plus minutes to prove it.

It’s been four years since the release of the band’s previous album Reborn and the group have been existing on a steady diet of singles in the time in between. Those have been gathered up to be added to the overall tracklisting for Timeless Reverie, resulting in an album that doesn’t care much to maintain an arrow-shot artistic throughline but instead likes to leap from place to place on a wider musical plane.

You can read some abums like trees that’ve sprouted from the ground over time, ideas that were seeded well in advance now finally bearing fruit. You can notice shared elements between songs and notate influences left and right as evidence of what a group might’ve been aiming for. Timeless Reverie is a series of snapshots of a creature rapidly tearing through the scenery instead.

There’s a lot of almost movie studio quality orchestration backing it but the way Timeless Reverie flows is a story of eight songs right up front with two scene-setting closing instrumentals that have a remade and reapproached song from their 2015 release The Highest Of Dystopia in between – creating an almost eleven and a half minute long symphonic melodeath block to close out an album that had previously been like a wall of razors with backing orchestra prior to it.

The fusing of shred-heavy melodeath with the more extreme side of death metal is a defining characteristic of the song “God Forsaken”, which is also true of Timeless Reverie as a whole. If the goal was to make a massive first impression, Serenity In Murder do so within that salvo. “God Forsaken” is a song packed to the brim with not just classic melodeath riff-work but also a hefty wall of blastbeats and big symphonic rumblings behind it.

As mentioned before, Timeless Reverie dances across multiple musical planes but on “God Forsaken” the order of the day is to be mostly overwhelming. Not to say that Serenity In Murder don’t play their hand for tasteful guitar solos within that four-minute boundary either, because once you’re past the initial hail of cinder-blocks and pummeling guitar rhythms, you’re treated to a more classically inclined and lead-melody-heavy guitar segment. The opening orchestration becomes the anchor point that segment takes off from and ends the song much more in line with the melodeath genre descriptor than just base “extremity”.

Which helps then, for the song “Matrix” following that one is a catchy earworm of a song with clean-sung chorus and guitar pyrotechnics that have wormed their way back into the death metal genre over the past decade. “Matrix” is even a song where it seems the symphonic stings and black-dress gothic melodrama take a backseat in favor of some glorious sailing above the musical clouds for three minutes.

“Matrix” is still a ferocious song, but one can get to the point where they notice the classic one-two pulsating drum rhythm from space as well. Timeless Reverie shifts between two-song formats in that regard for a bit, with “God Forsaken” and “Matrix” being the definitive two to start things out, and the two following are of similar ilk.

“Blue Roses…” favors the orchestral bombast approach of “God Forsaken’s” overwhelming musical wall collapse whereas “And The World Awake” could fall right in line with “Matrix” in terms of clean-sung chorus and massive guitar lead. Rarely do you see an album gain its genre-descriptor tags by creating a near visual separation between the songs in quite the way Timeless Reverie does, but the dynamic ensures you always have something to look forward for headbanging, so long as you draw joy early on from one of those two takes on the Serenity In Murder sound.

Of course once you’ve made such a statement and you’re confident enough to make yourself look stupid, Serenity In Murder surprises you with one of the stronger thrash guitar riffs to hit this year in the opening of “Never Defiled”, but honestly, who is counting at this point?

Since Timeless Reverie closes out in the previously mentioned manner, it does feel like two disparate segments being crashed together at one point, as if the band wrapped up on the solid rumble of “Revolt” and then decided to do the TV salesman act of “but wait, there’s more!” The eight songs making up the initial Timeless Reverie experience are already strong enough, even as Serenity In Murder start to drop some pretty blatant breakdowns – however brief they may be in the lead-up to a few chorus bits – so the descent into a massive instrumental segment makes for weird ending pacing.

Serenity In Murder do get to flex their more artistic muscles during the instrumental numbers and revival of an old favorite to close out affairs as a whole, so the experience ends on a weirdly calming note after such upfront aggression for thirty-four minutes prior. But you could never accuse the album of not feeling like a complete experience in that regard, even with one fairly obvious stopping point leading into quiet piano and a guitar solo.

Timeless Reverie has been out for months at this point but it is an album that will not let go. The Serenity In Murder crew have nailed their craft down to an exact science, and their ear for a guitar part so infectious that countries would deny its existence is already at an expert level. In the midst of the already densely packed songs – which is a trick the tech-death-sphere occupants like Inferi did – are so many different orchestra lines and solo bits that you could leap straight past the upfront extremity for something to either sing along to or hum along to.

Timeless Reverie is an impressive showpiece. Even five albums in and constructed out of a drip-feed of singles over four years and a tackling of an earlier song, Serenity In Murder sound as vital as a newly formed band. Timeless Reverie is the sort of melody-heavy extreme metal hybridization that you don’t want to miss out on.

https://serenityinmurder.bandcamp.com/album/timeless-reverie
http://www.facebook.com/sim.jp