(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Toronto’s Tyrant of Death.)

One glance at the track lengths of Tyrant Of Death’s new release Ascendancy should tell you everything you need to know about this album. With each song exceeding a ten-minute run time, Ascendancy is an intimidating as hell disc. Tyrant Of Death has released a few longer tracks in its time on this earth, but has never before collected a bunch of them in one location. At first glance without listening, it looks like Tyrant Of Death gone prog.

Ascendancy is the fifteenth (!) Tyrant Of Death release, with a time gap of about a year since last year’s Nuclear Nanosecond, an album that itself emerged after a longer gap of time compared to Tyrant Of Death’s more prolific days when three or four albums a year would hit. It’s not Senmuth numbers, but this project has a lot of material out there, which has meant that with every release the band has had to work insanely hard to differentiate itself from the pack, not only from other musicians but also from its own huge slab of work.

Ascendancy is the grandest attempt at that yet, with its longer track run-times and a bevy of guest musicians from throughout the circle of bands with whom project owner Alex Rise has long associated — meaning that four of the five songs on Ascendancy have vocal tracks as well as a guest guitarist or two. Ascendancy is an ambitious disc — one that moves from the industrialized chaos of Anaal Nathrakh to the oblivion of blasts and science fiction influences that have long worked their way into the Tyrant Of Death formula. And almost all of it moves at a breakneck pace, with almost no room to breathe until the album’s closer, “Biomechanical”. Continue reading »

(DGR reviews the 2013 album by Tyrant of Death.)

Tyrant of Death is easily one of the most prolific guitar projects out there. At one point it seemed like every Wednesday we were posting something from it, and at one point the ToD project managed to crank out three albums in one year. The artist behind the project, multi-instrumentalist Alex Rise, has toned it down since then, but we still have managed to see at least one Tyrant Of Death project a year. Because of this, I have spent an inordinate amount of time with this project as well, having come across it around the time he released the Blood Lust disc.

It’s been an experience, as each release has improved upon the last, and it’s seemed like we all learned as he did. Compositions got more complex, guitars got more violent, and the drumming remained as insane as ever without moving into the realm of seeming inhuman.  I have found that across the Tyrant of Death catalog there are some very distinct moods, and they tend to create a pretty solid venn diagram of where future releases may land.

There’s the sort of loud, crushing, machine-like death metal insanity of discs like Dark Space and Macrocosmic Lunacy, albums that can at times sound like instrumental or heavily industrialized Anaal Nathrakh, and then there’s the moody, almost dirge-speed and heavily electronics-filled discs like General Bliss and Connect. A few discs have sat in between those, but overall this project tends to shift between one of those two, so you likely will know within the first song or two what sort of experience you’re going to be in for. Both approaches have worked incredibly well, alongside a very loud wall-of-sound production style that tends to scratch the itch for the part of me that worships at the altar of Strapping Young Lad’s Alien. Continue reading »