(We present DGR‘s review of Veins of Sulfur, a debut EP by the French band Starlit Pyre that was released last month.)
Observing the changes and outside perspectives people bring to melodeath has often been as interesting as the permutations people make of the music itself. It’s a long-been-known quantity, and as we’ve witnessed cycles upon cycles of retrograde nostalgia and the ‘influenced by the influenced by’ crowd slowly becoming crowd-becoming forces of their own, so too does the genre change. Not necessarily evolving, but new strains are born or echo outwards into the wider metalsphere.
Given melodeath’s already pretty blatant mass-market trappings, the chosen aesthetic for some groups to approach the genre’s two-step-heavy guitar leads and thrashier rhythms to make it appear ‘refined’ qualifies for a certain amount of sense. We have grown older, so too does the genre. We’re past the days of snot-nosed kids sticking the middle finger up at a bunch of old folks in favor of an ambitious wildness and an ear for the catchy.
The calling cards that we’re following down that path are pretty recognizable as well, one being an ever-present keyboard layer in the band’s music… and the other? Well, sometimes that other one is uniforms, and French melodeath group Starlit Pyre seem to have both in spades with their July EP Veins Of Sulfur, a solid seventeen-minute block of melodeath that goes on a whirlwind tour through the genre before quietly sneaking out of the back of the room.
Starlit Pyre are a newly formed band, thus affording us an opportunity to be on the ground floor-ish with them, which is something that doesn’t happen too often. The eventual maturation and growth that a group may go through is part of the fun of following a band like this – when their first recorded outputs have all the baby-steps and wobbles one might expect of a group growing into its shell. It won’t come as a shock, then, that Starlit Pyre‘s whirlwind tour through the melodeath scene spends as much time paying homage as it does spinning up its own tales.
The gentlemen within the band are obviously practiced, so while they’re not quite hitting a home run on their-four song offering Veins Of Sulfur they have definitely made a case for history to pen them down as having had a hell of a solid start. It’s easy to overlook influences when a band say they owe much of their sound to the classics like Dark Tranquillity, At The Gates, et al…. but that’s also just as much an admission of a love for the top-heavy gait of the ‘one-two’ that often defined the drumming for groups like this as it is full ownership of the light trappings of key work that hang in this EPs stratosphere.
Starlit Pyre understand that oftentimes people sampling a group may only give them thirty or so seconds to get going before they’re off to the next thing. While there’re arguments to be made against that sort of attention-span destruction, when the world has so much music on offer and no matter how encyclopedic one may get, things still seem like so much you can also understand that viewpoint. Thankfully, opener “Empire’s Downfall” wastes little time getting going and laying out its various pieces early on.
Most of the materials that construct the eventual collapse of said empire are laid out early on; everything after that is just a fancier cue for the crowd to headbang. Starlit Pyre lean hard on the guitar melodies for their sound, and “Empire’s Downfall” crosses that checkpoint early on as well. When the band start experimenting with a rhythm segment to close out the song – including some much higher-in-the-mix bass guitar – the guitar melody that made up the earlier chorus, which sees its reprise during the guitar solo, peers around the corner again to soar above the band themselves until the ending.
You can definitely spot that Dark Tranquillity influence in a song like “Solar Rays”, whose opening and song structure echo a lot of the Damage Done through Fiction-era of Dark Tranquillity‘s sound. It’s not entirely derivative by any means, and to be fair, there are much worse playbooks to crib from if you need to build up the first couple segments of your song. The ominous choir-hits that claw their way up through the ground midway through the song in the lead-up to its own guitar solo and bridge are certainly an appreciable twist that one otherwise wouldn’t have spotted coming.
The titular “Veins Of Sulfur” song is equally as punchy as its two predecessors, though Starlit Pyre afford themselves a little more room to be ambitious. Nothing on Veins Of Sulfur crosses the five-minute mark but its title song lands closest to that pin at about four-minutes-and-fifty-seconds. In reality that doesn’t quite boil down to ‘extra stuff’ working its way into the song, but more each part being expanded upon. Sections certainly run a little longer than the previous two did and the goodwill earned by the more adventurous rhythm-segment heavy riffs and bass-guitar popping that boils up in this particular audio stew are spent on this song.
There’s a couple of segments that could easily be broken out into one-dimensional three-minute songs of their own, but combining them into this EP’s one true ‘epic’ song makes for a much fuller musical meal. Hence, we find them standing on equal footing when it comes to their juggling of influence vs adding their own blood to the sacrificial pool.
What is impressive is that even on the ‘me against the world’ toughness of “On My Own”, Starlit Pyre do a solid job of still working in a doubled-up guitar lead – though there’s a couple segments wherein the band could easily be trampling on Nightrage territory without noticing. When you’re grabbing a listener by the collar and pulling them through a sub-twenty-minute tour of melodeath though, it’s hard not find yourself treading into such waters.
Veins Of Sulfur is a rock-solid first statement for a new breed of melodeath statesmen from France. Starlit Pyre obviously have a copy of ‘keys to melodeath success’ lying around somewhere in their office because they pull heavily from the genre’s finer tropes and influences to assemble their first EP. Early singles from the band have built up to this point and this four-song offering continues to build a case for the band to put out an equally solid full-length.
There’s always room for expansion, improvement, maturation, whatever you want to call it, when a group first starts out. An EP like Veins Of Sulfur gives Starlit Pyre solid footing from which to launch themselves. Stability and placement being as it is for the band, they could launch themselves into orbit with an easy leap.
Veins Of Sulfur offers a strong first taste of things to come for the band and hopefully they find just as much to grow into from this EP as we as listeners have noticed upon multiple listening sessions, because an album grown out of the seeds planted here and ideas expanded upon by the same measure could make for one killer of a good time circle pit wise – in between the nodding in appreciation at just how good some of the lead lines are.