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Tag Archives: American Metal
Review: Scorned Deity’s Adventum
Recovering from my break and general state of busy, I tossed on some tunes and got to thinking. Part of writing about music you love is making sure it does not turn into a business, unless you will or wish it as so. Generally, I listen to European music. Most of the bands I end up falling in love with anymore are from the Great White North and a few from the Isles. Having cut my teeth on American metal in my youth, I constantly look for American bands to follow. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I missed this band. They contacted me regarding a review for their sophomore release.
The problem with the style of music this band plays is that it tends to come across as a wall of sound unless it’s done well. Scorned Deity offer a symphonic black-death mixture of metal. A generally flagging sound that has altogether caused more headaches of late than anything worthy of a listen. However, this Detroit, Michigan band hits the right notes of intensity and pushes the sound through from the operatic opening to its blackened end.
The mixture of the brutality of harmonizing death metal guitars and the frigidity of black metal soundscapes sewed together through Dream Theater/prog rock styled keys and synths. Each instrument inhabits its own spaces, reducing the wailing wall of sound so common of recent Dark Tranquility and other melodeath bands. The guitar tones are strong (it’s been a damn long time since guitar solos really got to me in metal) and well produced and the percussion is well on display. The band’s approach evokes Emperor to my ear, especially in its use of the aforementioned synths which in combination with the choral female voice creates an epically woven tapestry.
Well written and considered, Adventum pulls you straight into the music through its majesty and draws you down into its core with its intensity. The ride is generally satisfying, especially when the sounds don’t bleed together. If anything, the album suffers from a touch of schizophrenia as the band pulls from the two different styles and then attempts to also include industrial electronics. However, if that is my only complaint, I feel as if I’m nitpicking.
Scorned Deity’s second album is a worthy release and definitely puts the band on my watch list. I enjoyed their use of harmonizing melody and brutality. It is a writhing intense ride, but one that is completely worth your time if you’re interested in this music. And, damn is it good to have another American Metal band about whom to write that.
Weekly Music Review: Black Crown Initiate “Song of the Crippled Bull” EP.
Bandcamp did not fail me this time. I stumbled onto this band last week during my downtime. Like always, the band’s name, album art, and description grabbed me and pulled me into a listen. The trio, from Reading, PA, offer what seems to be their first recording, a twenty minute long progressive romp through varying styles of metal and rock.
The EP is a single song divided into four movements, the opening of which, Stench of the Iron Age, hums in on guitar. Soon joined by a loose, nearly funk style bass, the music retains a very airy quality, akin to coming into a dream. The vocals croon in contemplation with this music that slowly withdraws, becoming more and more fragile, until it explodes into its fury. The metal in the song reverberates in the band’s highly technical approach. First, the technical death metal here is amazing, drawing you further and further down to a morass. Second, the use of silence/stopping of a particular instrument throws just that much more tension into the song.
There is no gasp between tracks on this album at all, reflecting the use of each as a movement of the full composition. I tried listening to one track on its own and while good, it did very little for me. As a whole, the composition is where the reward is found. Ghost She Sends stomps in quickly, monolithic riffs shattering the ear after discord swarms through the introduction.
The Mountain Top is the band’s most direct song, a swirling mass of extremity and power. Yet, like clouds clearing, the chorus provides a cooling break from the pressure and tension of the heaviness. This is then reflected in the Song of the Crippled Bull where the music tails out on pensive arpeggios and power.
Ultimately, this EP is worth $3. Buy it. This is an amazing approach to music that I haven’t seen from American bands often which tend to voice heavily on the violence aspects of metal rather than the pensive. Like NCS wrote, Black Crown Initiate is on my watch list and I can’t wait to hear a full length from this band.
Weekly Music Review: Deafheaven’s “Sunbather” (2013).
Deafheaven is an American atmospheric metal band from the Bay Area of California, which means their contemporaries are bands like Ludicra, Grayceon, and possibly Stolen Babies/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. The West Coast metal bands seem to be focused on the use of black metal to provide a crushing, raging element within a song before pulling you back out with shoegaze rock qualities to balance, making Deafheaven no exception here. I came across Deafheaven on their EP Roads to Judah; a release I found amazing and a band that I began waiting for their next release. This greeted me by offering a bright pastel pink album cover with relief writing, with the light source bathing the album cover from the top right corner of the piece.
The album sounds better over headphones than when played through loudspeakers. The colors and the drive of its work is much more easy to hear in this solitary space than in sharing the sounds with others. Now, this may often be the case with metal bands, if only because others simply do not wish to listen to it; however, the production angle taken with this album really seems to emphasize the singular experience of one listener. Your own personal sun as it were.
“The Dream House” rips in, a writhing mass of tremolo and blast beats greeting the singer’s strained cries (it does not so much sound a growl or a shriek as it does a wail). It directly assaults the listener with waves of aggression, before growing past this into a bombastic, nearly ambient, style that draws back into a gentle melody of guitars that lead into “Irresistable.” Using this guitar and key driven instrumental to link the first two songs, the band returns to its focus on “Sunbather.”
This sweeping set of emotional pull provides sheer intensity, nailed its epically composed themes, driving the music to explain what the raw voice cannot be understood to have said. It is not apprehension or tension created by the metal here; it is full out wanting: a desire for more. That is why, when I listened at first lacking in criticism to this album, I did not fully understand the solemn emptiness of sound and the tuned down voice that meets right in the mix. The transitions at times brings the band to familiar places for the listener with the Cure, the Smiths, and other shoegazers known for their turbulent, yet melancholic, epic sounds (a transition in the middle of “Sunbather” comes very close to the Smiths’ opening riff to “How Soon is Now:).
“Sunbather” fades into a sample spoken passage (by Alcest’s Neige) over ambient electronics in “Please Remember,” breaking away from the sweeping melodies and scorched guitars through which drone becomes key. The sounds fade to clear terse moments; the sound of a drill (to my ear) against roiling percussion before returning to acoustic melody. This melody fades into sterling and cold guitar at the start of “Vertigo,” inspiring apprehension (if but for a fleeting moment using shoegaze elements instead of metal) and an uncompromising curiosity to not look away from the macabre. The sonically warped transition from this moment to its metal core is stunningly fresh before ambling down a full guitar solo whose intensity matches that of the vocalist. If you had any doubt by this point that Deafheaven was a metal band, then you would do well to listen to this song and discover they are.
There is something uniquely American about this experience on this album. It is equal parts self-absorbed and selfless. Its subtlety is found in its screaming, thrashing moments, rather than its quiet. Its assault, being the moments, where the music is at its most vulnerable, provide an insight deeper than just one person’s pain. It is the inhabitation of space among those of material and emotional wealth in a beautiful place where one makes up member of the hinterlands of society. Like Alcest brings the listener emotional warmth and landscape’s beauty in their music, Deafheaven brings the quintessentially American landscape of judgment (see “Windows”), emotional stuntedness, and loneliness of this place while packing it in a pretty pastel pink.
“Windows” brings religion to the table in the album, focusing on judgment, hell, and the irony of salvation through death, but combining that with sounds from a street corner and store cashier. “The Pecan Tree” ends the album filled with its greatest intensity. It is where the singer questions, like his absent father, if he will be able to love and be able to feel connected. Its transition from metal is into a tempered percussion driven focus.
Sunbather’s accomplishment here is that they are to me the first American Black Metal band to fully incorporate shoegaze elements into their sounds to produce a sweeping, epically composed and beautiful place. It feels entirely American in its theme and its moods, standing directly next to Alcest as the world’s best at this style. Originally, I did not care for this album, having listened to it over speaker instead of headphones. The headphones brought their goals out and demonstrated that I was wrong. It is inherently a solitary space this band inhabits.
The Esoteric Alembic 