(The Texas-based melodic death metal band Clad In Shadows released their debut album in late February, DGR managed to come across it, and now he’s turned in the following appreciative review.)
You can use your band name for many things in heavy metal, such as head-turning shock value or as a mission statement. You can even make it dual-purpose, as is the case of New York’s Clad In Shadows. They took their name from an early In Flames song that was a live staple of theirs for a bit, thereby not only making their mission statement clear but also laying out their influences and providing a good basis point for anyone with bare knowledge of metal music’s subgenres as to what they might sound like without hearing a note.
Let’s play a game then, because many of you will have guessed both by the band’s name and who is writing this here writeup what exactly Clad In Shadows sound like on their first album Monuments In Ruin. You have twenty seconds to think, and then come check back in and tell us how closely you landed with the rest of this introduction.
Did you guess that this was going to be blindingly faithful melodeath worship with enthusiasm that shines so brightly it could scour your shadow into the wall? Yes? Perfect. Because that is what Clad In Shadows are doing, and although the album isn’t breaking down any boundaries, it is doing a fantastic job in adding to the overall genre’s collective archive and blueprint.
Clad In Shadows are keeping to a proud tradition of two-person melodeath bands that have sprung up in the last twenty-plus years. As music has become more democratized and easily accessible, so too have people been able to find kindred spirits when it comes to their musical pursuits. The resultant effect for the melodeath world has been a font of projects that are smaller in terms of performance scope but large in ambition and enthusiasm.
Clad In Shadows have a taste for the late ’90s, early ’00s era of melodeath where melodic guitar leads and the occasional clean-sung chorus won out the day, just moments before the train known as keyboard and synthesizers crashed sideways into the station and became an inseparable part of the genre. There have been many bands willing to wave the banner for the genre, even as it found itself metamorphized and picked apart for the benefit of many of the other fractalized heavy metal subgenres, and more often than not it seems their calling has just been a desire to add to and preserve a core sound of melodeath lest it go completely by the wayside. Of course, there is always room for a spotlight-stealing guitar lead or two, if not buried alongside some clearly inspired folk-metal melodies worming their way through any song.
Monuments In Ruin is a nine-song, thirty-six minute release that Clad In Shadows have been building toward for a few years now. About sixty percent of the songs appeared on a set of two EPs that the band released in 2024. Often when this happens on a release you can almost hear the slow construction and maturation of a band’s sound. A handful of the songs will feel more primordial and simplistic, others straightforward but with a little intricacy in them, and the latest ones tend to be the most cohesive of the batch. That’s not the case with Monuments In Ruin.
The sound on this album is reflective of the fact that Clad In Shadows were clear-eyed about what they were going to create from moment one and the goal line was always within sight during their work. You can pick the songs from the 2024 EP pairing by staring at track listings and comparing the similarly themed cover art, but overall, Monuments In Ruin sounds like an album that has been simmering for some time, not something created in flashpoint fits and starts.
Surprisingly it is not the moments of “ah, I see that they enjoy ‘Moonshield’ as well” that stick out on Monuments In Ruin but the in-between space that Clad In Shadows have made their own, wherein they sound like a two-headed hybrid of Dark Tranquillity’s more agile moments and the sort of razor’s edge guitar of The Absence. Perhaps it lies in the vocals, but hearing the snarl emanating across songs like “As Eden Burns”, “Chaos In Collision”, and the galloping fire of “Into Oblivion” and not finding oneself conjuring images of other US-based melodeath groups – for as hard-scrabble as they’ve been over the years – is rather difficult.
Clad In Shadows find themselves upholding more than their fair share of traditions as an emissary between two continents in that regard. The many guitar leads peppered throughout hail from the glory days of their In Flames influence, yet that aforementioned knife-sharp guitar – which is especially prominent in “Endless Twilight”, one of the group’s earlier songs from that EP release series we discussed – has all the battle-scars of the studio-project crowd. Not quite as flashy as Mors Principium Est would get before they found themselves back in full lineup mode, but the guitar solos within “Endless Twilight” and “Echoes In The Void” are Clad In Shadows standing and being counted for the melodeath vanguards out there.
Where the Dark Tranquillity comparisons come in hard and fast are in the two closing songs, “The Crawling Eclipse” and “The Architects Of Our Demise”. Those two closers are among the most-indulgent of the tracklisting present, laying in the mid to high four-minute mark. Most of Monuments In Ruin keeps things concise but given that these were both some of the first songs released by Clad In Shadows at the start of their career, it’s understandable they’d be more ambitious in their pursuit of grandeur on a full-album release.
“The Crawling Eclipse” nestles itself comfortably in that mid-aughts melodeath playbook and “The Architects Of Our Demise” sends roots seeking multiple inspiration sources. Near-five-minutes is a hefty stretch for a melodeath band made of simple ingredients, but Clad In Shadows do well enough guiding the song through its minute-by-minute iterations. “The Architects Of Our Demise” does solid work tying off the Monuments In Ruin event as a whole.
It is insanely difficult to break out to a wider audience these days and Clad In Shadows don’t seem too interested in launching themselves to massive stardom from the get-go. Monuments In Ruin is an enjoyable debut that hews pretty close to melodeath’s blueprint, a desire that the band themselves highlight as the reason for their whole formation. The shared enjoyment and, yes, influence worship is partly infectious when it comes to Monuments In Ruin. It’s easy to be wholly aware that Clad In Shadows aren’t tearing down walls in the name of art and aren’t leading the next evolutionary step of metal as a whole, but are creating entertaining work all the same.
The world needs more melodeath bands that can cut to the core of how the genre works, without becoming the (metal)core of it, and Clad In Shadows are showing that they have the knowledge and ability to do so on Monuments In Ruin. Here’s hoping that they continue to stay in the forges for a while and not let the embers burn out before we see what sort of standard-bearing battle-songs they can come up with next.
https://cladinshadows.bandcamp.com/album/monuments-in-ruin
https://www.instagram.com/cladinshadowsband