The Apparatus

 Tuesday, 04 December 2007 As I frequently complain, progressive metal really isn't that progressive at all. 'Technical/melodic heavy metal' would be a more appropriate term for most of them, because I don't really see Dream Theater as being very progressive, nor Spastic Ink. Progressive is supposed to actually go somewhere. Adamind are one of the few progressive metal bands I've found that are actually kind of progressive.

The music is melodic, progressive heavy metal with a touch of Everygrey style power metal. What makes it good: no wanking. This is much closer to Clay Withrow than Dream Theater (thank god), and it feels like all the parts of songs actually have a point, no matter how long and sprawling they are. Additionally, the band hasn't lost sight of actual atmosphere and songwriting. The melodies are traditionally inspired, yes, but they're the important thing: good. This is actually melodic, and not in the incredibly tinkly way of most prog bands: there's some actual power behind the guitars, some fairly intense compositions, and even some double bass. It's prog METAL, not prog rock-masquerading-as-metal.

The production is, of course, clean, but there is one major issue with it: the vocals are way, way too loud. They're not bad vocals, but they really obscure the rest of the instruments, and in prog metal, this is a problem. This is a genre where the vocals really are a secondary element to the instrumental performances, which, as good as they are here, really shouldn't be hidden. The keys are effectively used, better than normal, in fact: they play bombastic melodies in the power metal style and never plink away in mock introspection. There are some other strange elements as well: the jazzy sections (real jazz, not the weird pseudo-jazz that metalheads are mostly acquainted with), the oddly placed guitar solos, and the Hammond organ on the title track (still trying to figure that out).

I guess the most important part of this album is that it sounds more like prog metal should be than what it currently is. It goes with the style of Clay Withrow and similar artists: it's got the actual power and robust composition of heavy metal and adds progressive elements to that, instead of just adding extra distortion to prog rock. This is a heavy metal album first and a prog album second: I have no doubt that these guys in full own more Iron Maiden albums than Yes LPs, and they don't show any of the weird insecurity of other artists in that. Prog metal bands are often only debatably metal, as though metal was some 'low' genre that they didn't really want to be part of, but this is unashamedly massive in its construction, despite the precision of the playing and composition. It's good.

While purely on the virtue of being a prog album it's not something I would listen to frequently, I'd still listen to it more than any Dream Theater album. I think that many metalheads who typically dislike the prog style would find much more to appreciate in an album like this. Remember how bands like Vehemence took melodic death metal back for the 'death metal' in the genre? Adamind are doing the same for the 'metal' part. Worth a look.

 Tuesday, 04 December 2007 There's a lot of brutal death metal bands, but Abnormality is better than a good amount of them, though I'd be somewhat hard pressed to tell you why. It just seems like this is a band that's put more time and attention into the way they craft their music, instead of doing what a number of BDM groups do and just taking all the tremolo riffs they have and putting it into a four minute song. Each of the three real songs on this band's 2007 demo is very fully realized and clearly thought through. It doesn't fall into generic brutal death trappings, even though it uses the same general elements, and I'm able to listen to it repeatedly without finding it stupid.

'Brutality' is a nice thing to have in death metal, and I love my brutal death, but with brutality almost seems to come a necessary lack of focus. What makes something brutal these days really seems to often be how many things can be going on at the same time, how discordantly they can run against each other and how abrasive it can sound; pretty much death metal playing grindcore. And generally, grindcore should stay grindcore in that regard, because there're very, very few bands that can pull that style off. Origin and Internal Suffering are a couple of them, and Abnormality is, to an extent, another. Back in the earlier days of the style, the brutality was used as a tool to augment songwriting, not as an end in and of itself. See 'None So Vile', 'Effigy Of The Forgotten', etc. Abnormality is willing to put the songwriting first and the brutality second without really letting up on either, which immediately makes this much more interesting than most BDM out there today.

While BDM is at least superficially aggressive, there seems to be an extra element of it in Abnormality. Vocal lines are evenly rhythmic and constantly leaping forward at the listener, and the riffs, while obfuscatingly technical most of the time like the majority of brutal death metal these days, do slow down, very occasionally to something vaguely approximating a breakdown. As you'd expect, the material here is mostly high speed and blasty more than slow and squealy, which I would say is refreshing except for how all brutal death falls into one of those categories these days. I like the instrumental performances. Dual vocals are strangely well employed, despite how they're basic growls. Strangely enough, it seems that the non-dedicated vocals of Michael O'Meara are used more than the dedicated ones of Mallika's, whose higher growls in contrast to the former's lower, more traditional Mortician-style grunts are used more as an accent than a primary vehicle. But this is good: the dual high-low vocals that often stream together work very well to convey the proper aura of intensity. The drum performance is also a very nice feature: it's got that sort of overt, excessively fill-laden aspect of mid-era Nile but actually works with the sort of overt, excessively fill-laden music that Abormality plays. Plus, the drum sound is great. I love the snare; it's like a drum stick tapping on a hardwood desk, which sounds stupid described, but is awesome on record.

So I guess this demo is mostly something you have to hear for yourself to really determine its value. As someone who's tired of hearing everyone clone Pyrexia or Brodequin, this is a good listen from a set of musicians who aren't quite thinking outside the box, but are feeling in the corners a bit. Recommended.

 Tuesday, 04 December 2007 There are many ways to be unconventional and nearly all of them suck pretty badly. Most bands end up tacking on bullshit novelty instead of actually doing anything new ('Look, this black metal song has a fiddle in it, how fucking unique'), and those that do usually have bad ideas to begin with or just execute them poorly. The 'Portrayal Of The Gray Man/The Decayed State...' split between Abacinate and (god-rot) attempts to rectify this with their two unique spins on death metal. But it's less the spinning that makes them unique; rather the spin on spinning itself, with each artist taking a different method of manipulating the base of their music. Of course, there's offhand a dozen bands at any given moment attempting to be nontraditional, so the mere promise of something exciting and new is little to sway most metalheads these days.

Abacinate and (god-rot) are relatively even when it comes to quality, but their delivery is radically different from one another. And yet despite this extreme differentiation in method, the results end up surprisingly similar: fairly technical death metal with elements of both melody and brutality and a greater or lesser core influence. Neither band ever seems to truly settle down into their style on this CD; each is trying new things with each track, making the end product possess a great deal more variety but also a marked lack of consistency. Not so much in quality, of course, unless your tastes are narrow enough that one or two tracks in particular grab you, but rather in the method and pace of delivery: you never quite get a feel of what the 'real' style of either of these bands are despite the handful of tracks each holds here. Perhaps it's the decidedly jumpy nature of the beast. Or maybe it's just immaturity, a feature that jumpy things often tend to hold.

Abacinate:

This New Jersey five-piece attempts an establishment of identity through synthesis: essentially, throw as many genres as you can into a blender and see what happens. The base is (like all things) death metal of a technical and brutal variety, then add a weird combination of grind, tech metal, slam death and a surprisingly large dose of hardcore and you finally get Abacinate. The basic equation: take fast-paced death/thrash/grind, insert the occasional extremely technical portion ala Psyopus, add a couple hardcore-derived breakdowns, and you have a standard Abacinate track. Yet despite how simple this equation seems to be, the overall style of the band still feels very indistinct. This is due to many things: the riffs change extremely rapidly and frequently, and many of them are very strange and nearly incoherent collections of notes, the drumming is particularly fond of small fills of snare and crash cymbal, numerous parts of the songs are atonal and devoid of melody and catchiness, and even the vocals switch almost randomly between low growls, high screams, pig squeals and seemingly every point in between these techniques.

Abacinate is a creative band. When it comes to songwriting though, I'd say they leave something to be desired. I appreciate songs with obscure, hard-to-follow structure, but Abacinate seems to delight in leaving you only the very barest handholds to allow you to cling to the constantly shifting torrents of genres and confusing musical directions. The breakdowns are the clearest and simplest portions of the music, but even they can be pretty strange, such as the middle breakdown in 'Life Is Worth Losing''s strange flurries of high notes every other measure. It's not a particularly pleasing listen, even if it is an interesting one. I suppose it'll be up to the future to determine whether Abacinate becomes a cult curiosity in metal or a more stable artist; at the present time, though, I find myself thinking about the music a lot more than simply enjoying it. Which, of course, is enjoyable in this way, but I can't help but wonder if death metal is supposed to make you try quite THIS hard...

(god-rot):

This New York trio manages to be even stranger than Abacinate in some ways. New York is synonymous with brutal, single-minded death metal, so when the first bursts of clean vocals and funkadelic sweep picking comes in on 'Trash Bag', it's a bit of a surprise, needless to say. As are the abstract drum patterns that fill 'And You Are Dead' to the brim with rhythmic dementia, or any number of bizarre elements seemingly interjected at the last moment during every one of their six tracks. Their style seems a tad more focused that Abacinate's, with actual melody (!) occasionally infiltrating their songs, such as on 'Demonic Cries I Crave'. This is generally a combination of melodic death with a bit of technical grindcore as well; I detect a trace of Circle Of Dead Children as a point of influence, but not much else. The clean vocals are strangely used on this side of the CD: the melodies sung are not particularly, well, melodic, and are used sparingly and repetitively, almost like classical instruments. This is technical music: not on the level of The Dillinger Escape Plan, obviously, but certainly extremely intricate and featuring an instrumental ability far above the average.

I can't say that the music is much more catchy or 'enjoyable' than Abacinate, but the tracks do have an added bit of coherence, aided dramatically by closing track 'Clothes', with features probably the most melodically lucid guitar riffs on this entire CD. Otherwise, there's a lot of furtive tremolo riffing and drum fills and strange combinations of rasping, gurgling vocals with cleans. This is a bit more purely experimental than Abacinate; while the other band essentially just throws a hundred things against the wall and sees what metaphorically sticks (not to say that a huge amount doesn't), (god-rot) seems to be creating something more genuinely new, even if that thing they're creating isn't quite fully formed yet. I figure that with time, like Abacinate, the kinks will either be worked out or intensified even more; but luckily these guys have already proven that the former is just as possible as the latter.

As far as who wins on this CD, I have to go with (god-rot) by a narrow margin. The latter band simply seems to have a better grip on where they're going and the ability to get there without being distracted by something shiny along the way. I figure that both the bands are fairly embryonic at this stage, and that a bit more time fermenting will be necessary to fully see each style revealed. The material on this split is not very 'fun' to listen to. What it is is thoughtful, difficult, testing music that thrashes against all the boundaries it possibly can in 37 minutes without much care for the consequences. At the very least, that's pretty fucking metal.

 Tuesday, 04 December 2007 It's nice, after a long trip abroad, to come home. After a proverbial trip abroad, reviewing numerous releases outside of my normal tastes, it's very nice to come back to what I know best: brutal, technical death metal, and in this case, Quebec's latest offering in the style, (the)Plasmarifle. While a certain part of it is my own fondness for the style, I really think that the band's debut EP, 'The Apocalypse Called In Sick... Can I Take A Message?' is a remarkably good opening salvo from the five piece, and I actually have to recommend it in a terribly overcrowded brutal DM scene.

(the)Plasmarifle's main influence is clearly Beneath The Massacre. The technical sweep riffs aren't as constant, and there's more in the way of traditional brutal death chugging ala Despised Icon, but the stop-start rhythms and general sound are in place. The music of (the)Plasmarifle is generally composed of frantic blasting under extremely technical sweep riffs, occasionally slipping into midpaced groove passages (but not breakdowns). The level of technicality present on this EP, like many Quebecois artists these days, is insane. Each member is well above competent with their instruments; there's about two riffs that I can think of that I would label as simple, and the drumming, when not extremely technical, is faster than almost anything else out there today. Of course, the constantly stopping and starting music does add a lot in the way of micro-rests for those involved; there's hardly a 30 second interval without some pause involved. This will probably annoy the hell out of some people, but I find it pretty tastefully employed.

Production is flawless: massive bass presence makes the music seem even more powerful than before, and the overall sound is very clear and well mixed. The drum sounds in particular are excellent, with a wonderfully tribal sound to the toms and snare. The band is also very fond of using deliberately degraded production as an atmospheric effect at certain points, which I personally love. There are some slight metalcore influences, but they're rather discretely implemented, and probably won't discourage any of those who can't stand Dead To Fall. I really like the vocals on this EP: there's no squealing or gurgling, just a fairly standard variety of death growl/scream that stands as an island of convention in the fairly chaotic music. It's one of the more punishing and brutal releases I've heard recently by virtue of not only technicality, but delivery: it's just as much about what they play as how they play it.

This is a niche release, but it's quite a large niche that's only getting larger. Anyone who loves the new style of ultra-technical brutal death will most certainly want to acquire this EP, as it stands as a great example of that style. I enjoy it a great deal; it's brief and gets the point across concisely and effectively. There's something to say for restraint.