I Wish I'd Heard It Then

I was just reflecting, as I began really sorting things in early preparation for this year's top albums list, on how much better my picture of metal this year is than the one I had last year. I honestly don't know if this has just been a much better year, but what I do know is that I barely filled out my top 10 in 2011, and I'm already having to cut albums I really enjoyed just to get this year's list down to 25. And there are still a couple months to go before the year is over, with several big releases yet to come (not least of which are the long-awaited Wintersun follow-up as well as the first Neurosis album in five years). In large part this is because I'm just way more active in exploring new music this year, as I've easily listened to three or four times as many new albums as I did last year.

In reference to this post's title, I've noticed, as I've continually trolled for new listening material, that I've encountered a number of records that I really wish I'd heard last year. My end-of-year list would have been far stronger for their inclusion. Some, like Verinen Saagat  by Valtyr, got their moments of attention early this year before there were enough 2012 albums out for me to shift to exclusively reviewing those. Not long ago, though, I encountered possibly the most glaring example yet of an album I deeply wish I'd heard in time to include it on last year's list.

In April of last year, the Canadian prog/tech death metal outfit Beyond Creation released their full-length debut The Aura.  This record is, without exception, the best death metal release I've heard from the past two years. It's powerful and intense, it features dynamic and inventive shifts in tone and tempo that are more fluid and effective than any I've heard in any death metal album I can think of, and it has the single greatest use of bass I have ever encountered in any extreme metal release of any kind. In short, this album is insanely, impossibly good. It would have shot to the top of my list for last year if only I'd heard it in time. Since I've stopped reviewing albums from last year, and this obviously can't make my 2012 list, I really just wanted to give the record special mention rather than allow it to slip between the cracks, because frankly it's a release I think any serious death metal fan will be richer for hearing.

The YouTube video below contains the full album.

Hour of Penance - Sedition

Hour of Penance are a brutal technical death metal band from Italy. They released their fifth full-length, Sedition,  in March.

These guys have established a good track record over the past decade with a series of strong releases, and with new members on drums and vocals the band had the task of showing that they had not lost their edge with these personnel changes. The resulting record is absolutely crushing. All bands in this vein are heavy, but  Sedition  has a sense of flow and cohesion that actually heightens the the intensity. In a simple non-stop barrage the crushing riffs, manic leads, and inhumanly intense drumming might begin to lose its impact and just wash over the listener like white noise. But Hour of Penance don't do that. Instead they introduce traces of melody you can grab hold of like a drowning man clinging to a raft, and then they start pounding away once they're sure you aren't going anywhere. Brief windows appear where you can catch your breath, just enough to keep you going, then the battering continues. The formula really works well, because instead of merely turning on the meat grinder like many brutal bands do, this record grabs hold of you and actively drags you through it.

There three specific features that really stand out to me above the rest in this album. The first is the vocal work. It's not the ultra low guttural burping that many bands think they have to use in order to sound brutal. Instead it's fairly mid-range, but it comes at you with intensity. This is not a deliberate death growl focused on tone, it's a bellowing attack that comes with enough force that it becomes ragged purely as a by-product of its animal ferocity. The second feature is the lead guitar. There are actually some carefully paced and well crafted solos over top of the frothing sea of intensity which stand out as surprisingly melodic. These speak not only of the band's musical capabilities, they also serve the valuable function of keeping the listener engaged as closely as possible with the music. Finally, the drumming is a standout feature from a purely technical standpoint. Its speed and power are driving, battering, and relentless. It is the engine that keeps the brutal technical end of the music crashing forward while you are being lured in by the guitar leads.

I honestly don't listen to much in the brutal technical death metal range because it often feels to me like the bands are so worried about pummeling the listener that they forget to engage their audience's interest. In this case, though, I was pulled in as I was brutalized. As a result, this release stands as one of the best listening experiences I've had with this type of record in recent memory.

Grade: A-
Powerful and intense brutal technical death metal with just enough compositional structure to keep you engaged while it beats you to death. Also, the album artwork is pretty sweet.

Therion - Les Fleurs du mal

Therion stand beside Amorphis as one of those early death metal bands that decided somewhere along the way to just smash their way out of the box and go wherever they wanted to go, regardless of how people wanted to classify it. The Swedes are now a symphonic metal band, notable for their constant evolution and creative mastery. A couple weeks ago they released Les Fleurs du mal.

Hmm, an album of cover songs? That's not a terribly promising start, but it's been done before and it's not a guaranteed disaster. But a metal album exclusively covering French pop oldies? Yikes. I kind of wish I'd known that going into it, but alas, I had not been warned.

There are some upsides to this record. Therion fans can't possibly be particularly concerned with the group's metal-ness, so the fact that this hardly qualifies as metal shouldn't bother them. And as an expression of the band's creative tendencies, this stands up; Therion are willing to to take chances and try different things, nobody can fault them on that count. Additionally, these guys are polished masters of their craft at this point, so every flowery operatic note and delicate orchestral passage is executed to absolute perfection.

That's where my compliments come to an end, though. As I said before, this is really not even metal anymore. The band has, at least on this release, dropped even the pretense of performing metal. What it really is, honestly, is a bunch of old French pop tunes turned into a ballet soundtrack that happens to have some electric guitars playing quietly in the background of a few tracks. And while I commend Therion's willingness to step outside the box, I feel I have to point out that doing weird crap just for the hell of it isn't always a good decision.

Grade: C-
The band are talented and inventive, but I think in this case they've just invented something kind of stupid.

In Flames

If you read this blog often, then you know that I love In Flames. In fact, I generally grant them the title of my favorite band, though that is definitely weighted in favor of their early releases. As I was sitting here, I began reflecting for the millionth time on how much In Flames have changed over the years. As most metal fans can attest, the changes have largely been bad ones. It's funny, though, because I've known people who complain that new In Flames is bad while "their old stuff like Soundtrack to Your Escape was awesome" which of course horrifies me to hear, but that's as far back as their knowledge of the band goes. For more active metal fans, many people start at The Jester Race and move forward from there. Some people actually do go back as far as their full-length debut Lunar Strain, which is a totally different animal, and for them the changes seem even bigger. But even Lunar Strain was a polishing of their sound from the truly primordial days. The first recording In Flames ever released was a 3 song demo in 1993, and if you listened to a track from that, you'd never even guess it was the same band that produced the records from a few years later.

Well, to amuse myself, here's a walking tour of In Flames starting with that first recording and bringing us right up to date.

Wrath of the Masters

I know I'm not the only one growing a bit tired of the recent old-school death metal and thrash revivals. In large part, that's because most young bands are not so much "reviving" the sounds as they are just flat-out ripping them off. As a result of this trend, it seems like lately the true masters of these sub-genres have stepped up to show all these young punks who the real bosses are. Sure Metallica and Morbid Angel let us all down, but they are not the only greats out there. For example, in death metal we got Vader's bone-crushing Welcome to the Morbid Reich  last year, while this year Unleashed cut the insane Odalheim.

Thrash, too, has seen several recent releases from these kinds of long-standing kings. Today, I take my hat off to three of them who have stepped up yet again this year and proven that they are still the baddest of the bad.

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Overkill released The Electric Age  in March.

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Kreator released Phantom Antichrist  in June.

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Testament released Dark Roots of Earth  in July.

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