(DGR is playing the game of review catch-up. Is today’s four-album installment the first inning of nine, or the first half of two? We shall see.)
I say this every time I’ve done it in its twice-yearly fashion, but smaller review collections like this are not ones that I feel good about doing. It doesn’t feel fair to the bands not paying the imagined debt I have with them, that I’ve done something so criminal as enjoy their music and yet not find the time within myself to dedicate toward the usual essay-long dissection and exploration of their newest release.
Yet, it is festival season now in Europe which means that metal’s biological clock is seeing fit to give birth to a ton of new releases. You may have noticed during the last month or so there has been a steady drip of reviews coming from my corner of the world, but truth be told, all of those were done just prior to our unwitting heavy metal May that we’ve created. The assumption being that they would run once a day so the site would always have something to post while we were out and about witnessing music or drinking ourselves into apocalyptic stupor.
You’ll note, that’s not how it happened, and instead the collective of releases that I had fished up from the world’s murky musical depths ran well into June. That doesn’t mean the exploration and listening stopped, either. Just as many were caught up in the nets or came out while we were on that aforementioned vacation, and we now find ourselves at the doorstep of a collection of music spanning months that needs to be caught up on.
You, dedicated reader of the site that you are, know next what is coming. It has traveled by many names: review roundup, things you may have missed, clearing the slate, material befitting the ethereal, music by swedes for long-haired plebes, a million other names that all translate to one basic idea – we need to catch up on stuff so we can maintain some semblance of being current yet refuse to leave these albums sitting in the dust.
What happens next is fairly straightforward: These reviews will be a little more truncated than I normally like to do things. A little more freeform, a little less proper, probably far more flippant and reckless in the writing than they should be. I always feel like I need to apologize because of that. These are not writeups meant to be tossed away, ephemeral notes on albums that disappear into the ether, nor are they meant to be dismissive takes of ‘yeah its okay’. All of these come recommended in one way or another, it’s just that the aforementioned tidal wave of releases is going to crash down upon our heads at any moment and there is still the compulsion to talk about releases that came out before the idea of ‘summer’ was a glint in this year’s eye. I just can’t stay trapped there forever.
So with that said, you’re going to be seeing a multi-part dispatch from the front lines of heavy metal, traversing a wide expanse of both physical and chronological space, all with the hopes of helping people find their next interesting thing to listen to.
And yes, every single one of these will probably open with some navel-gazing bullshit that crosses my brain in the process of writing them because where else is a glorified internet blogger going to massage their own ego? Print?
IATT – Etheric Realms Of The Night
IATT originally began their career as I Am The Trireme before shifting musical focus and style into something far more ambitious than the initial aggressiveness that their name might’ve let on to. Tastefully shortening it into IATT many years ago has allowed the band to craft themselves into a musical entity with much wider scope than before, and the group’s newest album Etheric Realms Of The Night is a continuation of that artistic honing.
Etheric Realms is the sort of artistic largesse and ambition that I’ve found myself drawn to as of late within the world of heavy metal. Wholly acknowledging that an album like this would be near-impossible to play live authentically without traveling around with your own circus-level population of musicians, IATT still find themselves aiming for the stratosphere on multiple levels anyway. It is that sort of ambition that has a sense of charm to it that would otherwise feel forced. When a group not only crafts an album of intricately tied together songs such that they resolve into a large suite of music, and then proceeds to create their own mini-movie of music videos alongside it, there is an initial agreement of ‘well if they’re putting so much effort into it at least I owe them a glance anyway, right?’.
And this is not meant from the viewpoint of the way one might address a younger sibling who is putting in at least a year’s worth of energy to grab your attention, but moreso that the band are so dedicated to their craft and their ideas on Etheric Realms Of The Night that it is difficult to not be drawn to it. There’s a strong desire to know what could lay within the bounds of IATT’s seven songs and almost fifty minutes worth of music.
What lies within those bounds is an entrancing mix of multiple styles that careen through not only the group’s entire career but also a combination of multifaceted influences and genre-explorations. Etheric Realms Of The Night is never at a moment in which it is not aspiring to be a gargantuan work, and it is one that quickly becomes hypnotic if not just because of the constant sense of discovery within each song and how the album constantly and thematically wraps itself around its own ideas.
It would be a musical gordian knot were it not for the consistent breaks into a near-post-black-metal explosion throughout the album and the unexpected instrumentation in between. IATT would be just at home being compared to a group like An Abstract Illusion as they would some of the more forward-thinking metalcore bands out there, and as they could just as easily be seen as appreciators of Opeth as they are In Mourning. IATT have a far-flung gathering of sound and inspiration to pull from, and carefully crafting an album like Etheric Realms Of The Night takes serious – as mentioned above – dedication. This is not something that could be done in half-measures, which could explain the expanded media approach that the band wound up taking as a whole when it came to this album.
An album like Etheric Realms Of The Night thrives on not only the unexpected but also a sense of overall catharsis as the album closes out. Where this album succeeds is that it not only excels on both fronts but also recognizes the art of peaks-and-valleys songwriting, with its songs all building toward a satisfying climax or emotional ascendance. They can be broken out into parts and explored individually – the one-two combo that opens the album, “Drift Away” and “To Lie Beneath” is a sixteen-minute epic that seems difficult to overcome until the equally progressive wanderings of “Quietus” becomes the vanguard for the last third of the album – but in reality this is a release that is well worth taking in entirely one go.
It doesn’t quite stick as hard as the previously alluded to Abstract Illusion’s recent two but IATT stick the landing just as close in the memorability department as one could ask while also attempting to carve their own path. Many groups seem to think the key to holding interest is writing long songs and just continually cycling back around on the same segments over and over again ad nauseum, but IATT succeed on Etheric Realms Of The Night by ensuring that the songs are just as well-woven as they are lengthy. It is the sort of album that solidifies a band’s stature and can define a career going forward. It is an album that rewards multiple adventures through it and is well worth the listening time.
https://www.facebook.com/iamthetrireme/
Bloodhunter – Sons Of The Abandoned
Spain’s Bloodhunter are a band for whom I wish I could say I had been at the starting gate for every single release – and I’ve been close a few times – if not just for the fact that their take on the melodeath genre is so oddly dynamic when they could’ve just as easily stamped out a record following familiar formats and called it a day.
Bloodhunter have cut their teeth in the world of heavy metal for over a decade and a half at this point, and four albums in, they remain remarkably idiosyncratic in their approach to galloping riffwork and high-screamed battle anthems. Bloodhunter are at this point equal parts comfort-food vendor and eldritch creatures gone exploring when it comes to the world of melodeath rhythm approach, and sometimes a song can be just as odd to wrap your head around as it would be recognizable to swing your head around to.
While it’s hard not to look at Bloodhunter and see them as a band with rebellion anthems as their backbone, they’ve certainly done their damnedest to break out of any cage one might easily place them in genre-wise; they made that obvious on their previous 2022 release Knowledge Was The Price. Their newest album Sons Of The Abandoned is the latest shot across the bow when it comes to being confident in that statement, and it is one that retains a surprising amount of listener interest while still aiming with sniper-like accuracy at a recognizable melodeath formula.
Bloodhunter are good. That much can be easily gleaned from any of the group’s four full-lengths up to this point. Bloodhunter can do ‘catchy’ with the best of them and Sons Of The Abandoned has its fair share of catchy-as-all-get-out songwriting. If you need a previous reference we did touch base with the band on their Knowledge Was The Price album and came to a similar conclusion there, while also noting how the band had already demonstrated a taste for something just off the beaten path of traditional.
When Bloodhunter give way to galloping melodeath armies and straightforward double-bass drum assault, they can move earth with the same amount of ferocity people who compete in strongmen competitions do. It would be unfair to portray them as a band solely in the salt mines of the melodeath two-step and circle pit though, which is why so much of how we’re looking at Sons Of The Abandoned is couched in terms wherein Bloodhunter are not just the straightforward head-on attack you might expect from something like this. Thankfully, Sons Of The Abandoned finds steady keel in both their indulgent explorations and that tried-and-true hallmark of the genre, even effectively blending the ideas multiple times throughout, without the dynamic shifting being so defined that you start to peg which songs are ‘the mid-tempo prog one’. Instead, dynamics change in such a way that you can’t quite always predict which path Bloodhunter will lead you down next.
However, Bloodhunter are storied enough at this point to know that a good tactic for grabbing someone from the get-go is to unleash hell in the opening few songs, so an opener like “The Devil’s Own” is the most red-meat for the melodeath fans that anyone could’ve expected. Built around trademark guitar leads and vicious vocals, “The Devil’s Own” is not a boundary-breaker – though the thrash metal drumming that stealthily folds its way into and out of the classic melodeath two-step is a fun bonus – but follows a well-honed blueprint, almost to fault. If anyone were truly worried whether the Bloodhunter crew could hang with the more marquee names in this style, then at the very least “The Devil’s Own” will hammer home that they could do it with their eyes closed.
It’s also why “The Outspoken” immediately following is a fun change of pace and part of what makes the band interesting. They are clear about their mission statement from the get-go but that doesn’t stop them from taking circuitous routing when it is available, so even the occasional shattered-ledge of a once stable guitar groove like the bouncing opening of “The Outspoken” is a pleasant surprise. That sort of ‘we know what you’re here for’ songwriting combined with the ‘now let us indulge ourselves’ does fit within Bloodhunter’s ideal of making this the most ‘true to themselves’ album of theirs thus far. It is interesting on a pacing front that “Threshold Of Hell” is equally as groove-heavy but seems as if it wants to hybridize its two immediate siblings to make for a neat musical triangle.
“Ephemeral Youth” and “The Path That Never Ends” serve as the mid to late album checkpoints wherein Bloodhunter remind you that they’re killer at the melodeath approach, but the highlight in terms of fun and unexpected is the sort of bludgeoning heaviness that makes up the title song. It has a mad-scientist approach to how it smashes its different elements together, taking the battle-anthem stock-and-trade that is the genre staple and going full-core breakdown for a bit and from there descending into death metal bludgeoning.
The shifts in sound exist like flashes of light wherein you could blink and not see them coming; it is just that suddenly Bloodhunter will have teleported into a different realm of heaviness and you’ll have missed how you wound up there. Laying smack dab in the middle of the album as it does, “Sons Of The Abandoned” is a large part of why the album creates an impression of them being not just a straightforward and anthemic melodeath group as one might expect. Sons Of The Abandoned may not be as off-angle as 2022’s Knowledge Was The Price, but there are enough twists and turns within it that a song like “Sons Of The Abandoned” is able to become the song upon which the album itself sort of turns. It summarizes all previous experimentation into one song and then lays the groundwork for the equally expected and unexpected that makes up the back half of the disc, save for the fun if not completely head-on cover of Annihilator’s “Human Insecticide” that draws the curtain on the album.
Sons Of The Abandoned is a journey of an album. Bloodhunter made their fourth full-length an energetic and constantly head-turning take on the melodeath genre. There’s plenty of red meat on this release, with about half the songs falling into classic ride-into-burning-cities territory but often that doesn’t stick to just one particular song. They’ll dance in and out of it as the mood strikes them, with few being as straightforward as you might expect. About half the songs here see them questing like intrepid world-explorers for different takes, and as a result Sons Of The Abandoned, though not as quite as prog-explorative as its predecessor album, is still more than just a solid collective of circle-pit music.
When Bloodhunter do give in to the temptation of straight-shooting guitar leads and two-step riffs they are killer, but that’s also something they nailed along about their second album. Bloodhunter being deeper into their career now shows that they are willing and able to flex the artistic muscles a little more, showing a finely honed talent for when to push and pull on any song and just how far they can stretch their chosen style. Sons Of The Abandoned is thus a more confident album than you might expect but also one whose confidence leads to plenty of surprises in between all of the classic melodeath dynamics.
https://www.facebook.com/BLOODHUNTEROfficial/
Emasculator – Thaumaturgic Resurrection
Barring the impressive amount of talent that is collected underneath the umbrella of Emasculator, they are a band that if nothing else has the fundamentals of brutal death and slam down to an absolute science. Sheered away from any sort of gore-drenched imagery and laid as a skeletal core, Emasculator know how to pull from the library’s worth of brutal death sciences and craft it into their own monstrosities, and now on their latest two-song release the band are in full death metal bulldozer mode.
There’s something to be said that, once you have shown you can be with the best mad scientists of a genre in contorting the rotten flesh of whatever viscera is left after the brutal-sect of death metal have passed through, you could write music about anything, and I could be easily lured into a false sense of security as to how much I appreciate it. The music could be completely anti-me and my writing style and I’m sure if the Emasculator crew put a strong enough groove and blast-beat behind it I’d be more than happy to attempt to catch a few wayward stagedivers so they don’t completely faceplant over the course of their set.
Emasculator up to this point have existed as an EP and demo-based band and their newest release Thaumaturgic Resurrection continues that trend. They seem as if they have a full-length in their back-pocket somewhere and when that time comes it will probably leave an impact like someone stomping right on the base of your sternum; their two releases prior to this one have already done so and Thaumaturgic Resurrection is no different.
It’s a two-song dual-purpose release; both pulse-check and pulse-quickener. It is to provide a sign of life for the band and let us (and them) have some idea of what their current ideas are congealing into fully, but also with both songs being of the class of brutal slam that is second only to witnessing a semi-truck drive off the top part of a multi-level highway structure, you can’t help but feel as if it is a shot of adrenaline straight to the core of your being.
Is it the most creative and genre-bending stuff out there a la Defeated Sanity’s musical contortions? No. Is it still musically like someone charging you with a baseball bat and ill intent? Yes.
Given that we are currently in the aforementioned demo-segment of the Emasculator corpse-swing it helps to keep in mind that Thaumaturgic Resurrection is extra-scratchy and brutal sounding. The difference between these sorts of things is a bit pedantic at points when it comes to death metal, simply because there are groups out there for whom this demo is professionally produced enough to sound as if it was a different band’s full length.
The sound of unrelenting violence comes in multiple forms and some of that can be done as an attack through recording quality on top of just how down-tuned or groove-heavy your riffs may be. Emasculator are exploring two different fronts in that regard with one groove-heavy song that moves with a giant’s lumber and then following up with an equally traditional all speed, no thought, overwhelm through adrenaline song. Both songs land around three minutes and forty-five seconds, meaning you get a seven minute issuance of brutality with Emasculator’s latest attack.
They fight their way through a collective of brutal-death tropes and familiarities, before blurring into grinding death metal riffs for the entirety of these two songs. Where you’ll notice the change is the sudden pin-drop that signals the start of the titular “Thaumaturgic Resurrection” song. “In Blood And Fury” is all about the downward fall of the executioner’s axe; each rhythm section and verse all ascend toward the next hefty chug and downward swipe. Of the two here, “In Blood And Fury” moves by sheer heft. It is the groove-magnet of the two songs, attracting all around it so that another gigantic double-bass-driven truck of a guitar segment can crush anyone in front of it.
“Thaumaturgic Resurrection” on the other hand is the aforementioned speed and blastbeats hurricane of a song. Delectably complicated in that sort of ‘this is way too much guitar scrape’ style of writing, “Thaumaturgic Resurrection” may only be five seconds longer than its immediate forebear but it easily crams two-to-three songs’ worth of brutal-death guidance into it. It’s not often you get a song that is as fiery as it could be and equally used a guide to a genre as a whole, broken apart with particular segments pointing to different evolutionary trees each time.
As Emasculator continue to explore the realms of death metal and all that is available to them, the demo to EP to demo approach starts to feel fairly pragmatic. They’re not fully tied down into one locked subsection; the basic objective right now for Emasculator is the endless pursuit of brutality and whether the songs lie in fifteen different sub-genres or something more un-repenting and slam-focused there is at least a reliability that the music will be issued forth via bulldozer.
It still feels like Emasculator are tantalizingly close to an eventual full-length – which given the speed at which I’m writing these, could likely be announced before this column runs or the heat death of the universe, either one very Metalocalypse fitting – as they tie themselves around the handful of ideas that will evolve into the next issuance of brutality. Until then, Emasculator continue to hammer forth in a world of solid musical beatings that keep them as a steady source of musical violence.
https://www.facebook.com/Emasculator/
Goreworm – Miasmic Solitude
Rank Canada’s Goreworm among one of the pleasant surprises that I’ve come across this year. While it would be lovely to say that all my years of trawling the world for heavy metal in all its various calcifications and forms still often leaves me in awe, it has been just as likely of late that I find myself ascribing to the Jane’s Addiction method of Nothing’s Shocking when it comes to music.
Mayhaps it has just been a little too long in the mineshaft, such that I am familiar with every vein and ore and which will lead to a rich deposit somewhere down the line? Either way, when music feels more like rote recognition of style than musical joy you wonder if the tolerance for it is a tad too high. Then you get an album like Goreworm’s Miasmic Solitude, which on its face should be among the many, many, many groups of a saturated technical death metal leaning genre replete with sharp pointy aesthetics and enough science-fiction writing that the local library has a section that is probably jealous.
Yet somehow, Goreworm manage to surprise because they effectively blend genre-lines that quite a few groups have had a surprising amount of struggle doing, mixing together the modern era’s technical fascination with a noisier and chunkier old school approach, alongside the dramaticism and dynamics generally reserved for black metal’s reactionary Victorian gothic sub-sect. The result is a surprisingly effective collage of sound that is still relatively objective-focused, such that you almost don’t notice just how well Goreworm have mixed so many disparate ideas together and still have somehow landed in the tech-death-oriented arena.
The question then does become if we wound up here by happy accident or joyful circumstance. Goreworm’s songwriting is delightfully – if recognizably – head-spinning from the second they begin on Miasmic Solitude. From “Conjuring” until the album’s third song “The Enthralling Grave” it feels more as if the band have placed you in a car with them and driven it down the side of a cliff, the music being the soundtrack to your eventual impact below. Granted, Goreworm are using a more philosophically-minded and science-fiction-driven approach to their lyrical message, but the songs themselves remain a steady intense battering with that previously-mentioned three-pack basically forty-five-second speed-dating you through the entirety of Goreworm’s tech-death side of their musical approach.
It is deeper within the bounds of “Orbweaver” that you’ll begin to hear a prog-death influence, and like many albums that wind up oddly frontloaded with one style, the experimentation only gets more ambitious the deeper into a listening session you get. Miasmic Solitude clocks over forty-minutes worth of listening time and Goreworm have chosen a challenging musical path, having to work that much harder just to maintain someone’s interest in any particular song.
Which may be why songs like “Jarell” and “Strelly” – names you’d never expect to see in a genre more prone to word salad than most others save for the ritual incantations of the incredi-kvlt crowd out there – received such early focus. These songs are the ones wherein you get that post-boxing-match-participation whiplash through multiple genres. Many bands have found that they basically have free-reign to mix together genres nowadays, as so many have been fed down the generational influence pipeline that it seems that only with age can you identify the progenitors of any specific sound and draw the eventual throughline from a certain region to now.
To many newer groups this is how a style always has been, and when you get to be both progressive and technical with your death metal, you have a lot of room to go mad – which is basically what happens within those songs. Goreworm’s reckless abandon when it comes to barreling through death metal styles even allows for a real Death by latter Prog-era Death musical exploration in the instrumental “Strelly”, which all spills into the expectedly climactic titular “Miasmic Solitude” song.
Goreworm’s second full-length – and fourth release overall – demonstrates an impressive amount of growth for the band. They may be excited dashing between a bucketful of influences and a buffet-layout of ideas, but for the most part Goreworm’s multi-directional prog-death hybrid worms on Miasmic Solitude. The sheer neck-snapping pace of some of these changes may get a little tiring at times but it’s hard to attribute what to where to why when it comes to such a thing. The appreciable part is that Goreworm were capable of making almost every one of those ideas and inspirations work, to such a point that Miasmic Solitude coheres together and doesn’t sound like someone armed with an industrial stapler just slamming layers together and declaring that it will work out in the end.
The multi-generational throughline of Goreworm’s music can spark a variety of discussions and that is also what allows Miasmic Solitude to live beyond just being a classic ten-song and forty-minute head-twister. Goreworm achieve their chosen objective of being a tech and prog-death band at four songs in and then spend the rest of Miasmic Solitude demonstrating why they are aiming for more than just ‘that’ and why they will be a group worth following.