The Apparatus

 Friday, 14 December 2007 As Light Dies' debut album 'A Step Through The Reflection' is a stunningly ambitious one. I can't think of a debut album that has been as overwhelmingly layered and multifaceted as this, and especially not one that's pulled its attempts off so well. The music on 'A Step Through The Reflection' easily trounces Opeth, Dream Theater, and other so-called 'progressive metal' bands, not through the technicality of the instrumentation, but simply through the enormous volume and variety of ideas that they can lay out one by one in such exquisite fashion.

As Light Dies plays a rather indistinct combination of metal genres, the most obvious being progressive, gothic, and a bit of power. But there's also a very high influence from ambient and even some Cynic-style jazz fusion elements. Ordinarily, this set of ingredients is something I would find very distasteful, but As Light Dies manages to maintain coherency and craftsmanship throughout. The music is technical, but never extremely so, and combines non-metal instruments such as violin and cello in a tasteful and non-intrusive way. 'A Step Through The Reflection' is structured much like the album 'Frail Visions' by French funeral doom band Remembrance; that is, lengthy metal tracks interlocked with short ambient/neoclassical intermissions. At 70 minutes, you would think that such layered music would be excessively taxing on the listener, but this is not so: the streaming, cleverly dovetailed structure of this record makes consuming it as a whole not only necessary but highly enjoyable.

Alone, the songs are good. But when woven in with each other track, an entirely new life is sparked within them, with the massive, overreaching story of the album blooming beautifully. The music here is generally on the softer end of metal, with its heavy prog rock and classical influence, but there are some surprisingly brutal parts with blasting and black metal tremolo riffing; it's just that these portions typically have a cello maneuvering over them to make things interesting. As Light Dies are sonic carpenters of the highest degree, combining seemingly incongruous parts into a whole that is pleasantly multifaceted and unique. 'The Temple', for example, cycles through black metal (with genuinely cold Norwegian style) with violin accompaniment before abruptly sliding into choir-fronted prog metal, and later sliding through jazz-influenced portions and all points in between these three. Yet it never feels that the band is merely doing this to express sophistication: all the melodies are quality and placed carefully among the others, with very little filler material at all.

Typically, interlude tracks are fodder to increase track numbers in the face of a lack of material. However, the interlude tracks on 'A Step Through The Reflection', typically composed of violin, cello, and/or ambient sounds, are extremely well executed in the scheme of the release. They are genuinely well crafted on their own terms, and they link the more substantial tracks together in exquisite fashion. There's very little in the way of sharp delineation between tracks on this LP; most of the transfers are indistinct matters of sustained notes and sound effects, making the album even more unified than it was before. I've rarely heard a release that's so easy to listen to completely. I would say that this album is a joy to those who love to listen to a release through headphones in the dark: the simple number of layers in atmosphere, instrumentation, and songwriting could be subject to many hours of exploration.

As Light Dies has surprised me tremendously with their debut LP and its display of extremely mature, multifaceted songwriting. I can only hope that future releases will match the quality of music represented on this CD. This is the band that should be occupying the spot that Opeth currently resides in; they are much more deserving of such extreme praise and recognition.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 No, I haven't heard the previous two releases, so I'm not going to be whining about how it doesn't live up to 'A Celebration Of Guilt' like so many people seem to be. Nor am I going to whimper about how Arsis' logo isn't on the cover (though I can't understand why the fuck that would be an issue anyway). So, all that aside, we have 'United In Regret', the second LP from the trendiest band in technical death metal next to Spawn Of Possession, Arsis. Well known for their... well, I don't really know, the words 'technical' and 'progressive' get thrown around a lot, so I guess those. Now, I can't personally see why this is so widely revered to be an amazing band; however, I can see why people enjoy it, and why it's a decent tech death album.

I don't care what other people say they sound like, because what I hear is the half-retarded incestuous lovechild of Dark Tranquillity, Anata, and Necrophagist. 'United In Regret' has some of the melodies and the vocals of the former, the obsession with with alternately paced guitar lines of the middle, and the classically-infused leads of the latter. The music is a moderately technical, moderately melodic variety of death metal that, while refreshingly devoid of 'sick breakdowns', still doesn't impress me as much as it seems to other people. Despite this, I'll give it significant credit for being a hell of a lot more interesting than most of the bland, derivative technical death metal bands that are floating around these days. Amazing what, oh, I think they call it 'songwriting', can do for an album, isn't it?

I'm not sure why, but the songs on here feel long as fuck for some reason, despite them all being just around three to five minutes long. Maybe it's due to the volume of stuff going on at any given moment; every song must have five hundred fucking riffs each. Of course, it's a crapshoot as to whether they're actually good ones. While there are some badass things going on in here, they're balanced out by portions that really seem to be here simply to give the songs more meat. There's more music than ideas, but at least it's not the insane case of a lot of bands these days: there's probably around three minutes worth of interesting ideas for a four minute song on 'United In Regret'. There also seems to be a pretty distinct dependence on technicality to carry the songs at times: I'd say that, really, the best parts of 'United In Regret' are when the band stops doing arpeggios and just allows themselves to make solid melodic death metal.

Apart from this, there's not much to say about this LP. Certainly most metal fans will have no problem giving this a listen; however, I'm not going to claim that Arsis is as legendary as they are claimed by many. But when all is said in done, 'United In Regret' is a solid, fairly enjoyable bit of death metal. It's just not incredible.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 At its inception in 1987, grindcore was abrasive and furious but still possessed the idealism and belief in a brighter future that entranced previous punks and the hippies of the '60s before them. Unlike its cousins in death and black metal, grindcore did not take into its folds the nihilism that was growing so popular in the metal scene at the time. Of course, the ancestors of grind were mostly forgotten by the scene at large after goregrind's message of pathological terror was decided as more interesting than politics. So, while the politics in early grindcore were not entirely absent, they had most certainly fallen by the wayside in favor of the 'harder, faster' aesthetic that seized it in the years after its heyday, and were now relegated merely to thin, unearnest lyrics that existed more out of habit than conviction.

Enter Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus. A Clearwater, Florida grind project, Bodies played a modernized form of traditional grindcore with an emphasis on decisive, varied political ideology. However, this is not the grindcore of yesteryear, where music was played sloppily and at high volumes as a desperate cry against the downward spiral of humanity. Instead, Bodies understood the finality that death and black metal sought, and let loose the final, strangled shriek of humanity before it disintegrated and fell silent for eternity.

Bodies was such an angry band, full of the venom of early Napalm Death or Brutal Truth. In fact, Bodies was a band too angry to survive, too entropic and narrowly focused to ever be able to really go anywhere but down in a hail of gunfire. This all sounds very unappealing, I know, but this reckless abandon towards personal safety, their perpetually exploding martyrdom is so clean and pure. It almost makes you think (contrary to the band's wishes, I'd imagine) that the values of grindcore haven't been entirely extinguished.

From square one (in this case, a square delightfully entitled 'A Lubricated Rubber Glove And Pornographic Photos Of A Decapitated Chinese Hooker') you can feel how loosely the band is kept together. Not in the musical performances; in this case, they are highly technical and impeccably timed. No, the utter ruthlessness is present in the structure of the songs, which resemble mathcore acts such as The Dillinger Escape Plan more than metal. The structure of the track seems to alternately decay and flourish, mostly writhing in its painful entropy but occasionally harmonizing to create something genuinely musical (a very rare occasion on 'Simian Hybrid Prototype'). When you hear material like this, it's no wonder that the Bodies was so short-lived.

The tracks seem to have some sort of natural sequence; or perhaps they're all so esoteric that it's hard to imagine them being composed in a random fashion. At the very least the first two tracks are rational; the second, a two and a half minute sample of a political speech is daring yet logical, almost a natural continuation of what Napalm Death might have done had they kept experimenting. And yet things take another, even stranger turn with the next track, 'Love Affair With A Mannequin', where the production suddenly shifts to raw, high-pitched, minimalist noise. These switches between traditional, clean grindcore production versus the black metal-styled sounds is something that occurs throughout 'Simian Hybrid Prototype'.

It's about fifteen seconds into the 5th track, 'Hoist The Black Flag (And Begin Slitting Throats) that the fate of Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus becomes apparent, that the flailing, tragic tones expressed on this EP aren't so much the sounds of disaffected youth but of the band unravelling at the seams, not unlike the society around them. Here, political issues are eschewed or described in obtuse interpretations of personal crises, like the diaries of average people who can't shake the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong not only with civilization, but with them for living in it. What else can explain the collapsing World Trade Center that is 'Seventeen Reasons To Die Wearing Black'? What other way can one attempt to rationalize the jazzed out middle portion of 'Fuck Her Like You Paid For It' except to say that the world is ending?

And as it ends it gets grim, oh god it gets grim starting with 'The Ugliest Smile In Rock And Roll', over seventeen seconds of sample culminating in a song even more minimalist and sarcastic than 'You Suffer', like the pathetic mewling of some Starbucks-drinking yuppie who suddenly realized his Land Rover wasn't the key to eternal life. Such hilarity is found in humorlessness, such sarcasm buried deep in self-loathing. 'White Trash Whore' is probably the most 'together' track on the album, almost resembling the moment of realization in the space between materialism and fatalism. And the natural subconclusion of our story is the dreadfully hipster-ironic cover of S.O.D.'s 'Fuck The Middle East', working more as an insult to themselves for even attempting to recapture bygone days than any relation to the original band.

But even a band such as Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus has a sense of twee dramatic flourishes. The closer 'Last Words Can Be So Cliche' bounces along strongly until its end, where it all just sort of falls apart like 'Raining Blood', but instead of expressing power it just expresses the sort of banal, uninteresting deaths that we'll all be experiencing very soon.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 I often look at albums like snapshots from the lives of bands. In some ways, they appear as fragments, images of a single, living organism that flourishes or decays over time. It seems that many times you can tell what is occurring not merely musically, but personally and socially within the musical artist at hand. This split between Floridian grinders Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus and Quebecois deathcore artists Despised Icon almost epitomizes this concept. What you get to see here is the precise moment in time when both bands met with each other in their relative directions, like market equilibrium on an economic graph: Despised Icon climbing to the top of the pile that is the modern metal scene, and Bodies' insane plummet towards self-destruction.

The first side of the split is the swansong of Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus. The final moments of their debut EP 'Simian Hybrid Prototype' saw them disintegrating out of self-loathing and disappointment in society. On this disc, they're in a pretty obviously zombified state, clearly having decided that this would be their last release. It seems strange that such a band that writes music so full of passion and anger could become so robotic, but perhaps with was the logical conclusion to their saga. In the same vein as 'Simian Hybrid Prototype', one can imagine that Bodies would only find it appropriate to go out with a whimper instead of a bang. This all seems rather negative, but really not; these three small tracks are a case study of a band's death. In some ways, their material feels less like Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus and more like another bands attempt to replicate them. The music is at least an approximation of what came before, in its technical, always changing grindcore, but it seems genuinely dead inside.

Whereas on 'Simian Hybrid Prototype' Bodies used interpersonal conflict (with an emphasis on the 'personal'; the release is so sardonically emotional as to reflect some perversion of indie rock in its disgusted earnestness) to illustrate greater problems with society, the split takes a much more direct route towards political criticism. Here, Bodies paints a rather different picture of a world that didn't go to hell due to the pathetic apathy of its populace, but due to the concentrated effort of those in power ('Choking back on dirt in the defiant desert sun/they digest the fields of their enemies/The Politicians offer no way home/No escape). The themes are rather familiar here: Corrupt warfare, enslavement by political system, man betraying himself; corresponding to each of the three tracks, respectively. What effected such a sudden change? Who knows. Like most things that Bodies discussed, the reasons don't really matter. Either way, Bodies are dead. Long live Bodies.

And with nary a glance back at the pillar of salt that Bodies has turned into, Despised Icon takes the reigns. Coming merely three short months before the release of their second LP, the split represents a rather tertiary but still undoubtedly fascinating little detour in their style. I suppose that calling it 'experimental' or 'progressive' would be a bit of a misnomer, because this does form a logical bridge between their two LPs; the mysterious part is how they released material composed at such a precise part of that bridge. Despised Icon on this split has little to no connection to their rather breakdown-heavy form of deathcore (not to say it isn't artistic; however, I'd be lying if I didn't say that some of their material was disconcertingly easy to mosh to), nor does it really have much to do with the spinning technical frenzies of their early material. No, this is far subtler, and in a way, the darkest material they ever released. Lyrics are still focused on interpersonal relationships (of the sour variety, certainly), but in this case they offer little outright hatred. Instead, Despised Icon are biding their time for the opportunity to strike with absolute malice, reflected in how very black these songs are.

While the basic structure of Despised Icon's music is present here (dizzy, atonal, technical death/metalcore that climaxes in carefully engineered breakdowns), it seems markedly different. While the first track, 'One Last Martini (But You'll Never Notice)' is fairly close to both earlier and later material, the latter two tracks take on a quality inherent to this release alone. 'Oval Shaped Incisions' and 'Sever The Ties', despite their speed and technicality, have a dark, brooding quality to them. Flurries of drum fills erupt in the first seconds of 'Oval Shaped Incisions' before peeling into dual-harmonizing vocals juxtaposed with high chords, and while this seems all very brackish, it bridges into a bitter, rhythmic portion that seems a big step away from most music in the metal scene today. When the breakdowns start, they seem to drone more than usual, sleepier and more mysterious than they should be. This aesthetic culminates in closer 'Sever The Ties', where the last half minute just slows down into a thorazine-laced coma of squinting eyes and depression. Interesting stuff that will never again be played by Despised Icon.

This is most certainly an intriguing split, though not for the reasons it should be. Artistically, this isn't the most amazing 20 minutes of your life. But it is a rare, undiluted glance into the life of a modern death/grind musician. Pick it up, simply as the door to a very, very strange world.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 The newest Despised Icon LP sounds like the band was shooting for a sound similar to that found on their split with Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus but getting distracted by something shiny along the way. For some reason, Despised Icon, poised to take over the extreme metal scene after the brilliance of 'The Healing Process', decided to take this... diversion. I don't think it was lack of ambition that led to this album as much as an eager attempt to 'do something new', although what turned out wasn't quite as new they'd hoped.

What I'm saying sounds harsher than it should, as I do very much enjoy 'The Ills Of Modern Man'. Like all Despised Icon releases, it's highly brutal, technical, and and possesses very solid songwriting throughout. Of course, some parts of the equation have changed as predicted. First off: the atmosphere here seems to be a reinterpretation of, as stated before, their material on the split with BITGOTA. The general mood is of a definitely darker note; not to say that 'The Healing Process' or 'Consumed By Your Poison' were particularly cheery either, but the sound on this release is most certainly geared to being more oppressive and claustrophobic than on material before it.

Possibly the most significant change that we see with 'The Ills Of Modern Man'is how metalcore seems to have been cut out entirely and replaced with Hatebreed-style hardcore. I can hear the snorts of derision coming from the metal scene already, but I'd like to say that the DM/HC combination isn't nearly as terrible as you would expect it to be. Yes, the breakdowns are more space-driven, and instances of gang vocals provided by numerous members of the Quebec metal scene appear on songs such as 'A Fractured Hand' and 'Fainted Blue Ornaments', but the general candor of the music isn't quite as tough guy as you'd expect at first glance. However, on a similar note, the feel is less introspective and philosophical as well; it's more self-torturing and spiteful as a whole.

The album feels more like a collection of songs than a conceptual work. This was an issue that I thought had dissipated with 'The Healing Process', where each song flowed cleanly into the next in logical sequence. There's a lot of weird decisions when it comes to the songs on this album: the most obvious is the inclusion of 'Oval Shaped Incisions' from, you guessed it, the BITGOTA split, added seemingly at random. It sticks out pretty clearly from the rest of the album, and I'm still left wondering why they added it near the end. It really feels like a last-minute decision designed to inflate the body of the album, but it's not a terribly distracting thing. More distracting is the production: clean, but with a huge emphasis on drums and vocals, causing the guitars to frequently be washed out during the blasting sections. In addition, the sound is extremely cold and mechanical, not unlike Beneath The Massacre's 'Evidence Of Inequity', but lacking the technical fury of that album and adding more of an emphasis on groove.

And groove this album does. Breakdowns function as songs' centerpieces more than ever before, and are less preoccupied with slam than a more traditional breed of groove. The breakdown in the middle of 'In The Arms Of Perdition' could even be interpreted as rockish, at least until the end starts to go into dun dun dun, dot dot dot territory. The most hardore influenced song on the album is clearly closer 'Fainted Blue Ornaments', which is surprisingly the best song on the album by far. That track's epic lead guitar meshing with street-level hardcore riot shouts and melodramatic band performance is stunningly well employed. Speaking of performances: top notch all around. Riffing is meaty and punishing, dual vocals are still effective, but by far the centerpiece of this album is the drum performance. Inhumanly fast at times (the title track's closing blast is incomprehensibly blazing) and uniformly machinelike and perfect, it accentuates the inhuman, mechanical atmosphere of the album as a whole.

While I'd say 'The Ills Of Modern Man' is probably the weakest Despised Icon release so far, it earns such a place only by an extremely narrow margin. Any fans of the band will still want to pick it up immediately, and those turned off by the earlier works may want to give the band a new chance. Despised Icon is the best band in modern deathcore for a reason. Highly recommended.