Album Review; Dendera - Pillars Of Existence

Released Via Metalbox Recordings
Genre: Heavy Metal

Dendera’s debut ‘The Killing Floor’ was an enjoyable trek through heavy metal soil that felt modern but a little too familiar at times, but I can say with great pleasure that ‘Pillars Of Creation’ comes across as a much more mature beast. Influences of Judas Priest, Megadeth and Dream Theater all shine through the dust on this record, but it’s the few hints of progressive metal that give this record the more up-to-date feel that the aforementioned debut lacked slightly. ‘Claim Our Throne’ starts slowly before bursting into a solid opening track, then ‘Bloodlust’ takes things to the new level. This is a track destined to impress live audiences on the band’s upcoming slot supporting Anvil. ‘In High Tide’ bears the British mark of Judas Priest with its melodic majesty, though Ashley Edison’s vocals are more reminiscent of Bruce Dickinson. This is perhaps the biggest triumph of Dendera; they’re easily the most impressive pure heavy metal band to come out of the UK in recent memory. Other bands would do well to take note that while there may be no extreme vocal styles on show here, this sounds very fresh. This is simply due to the fact that in the metal scene as it stands today, this does sound fresh. ‘Disillusioned’ shows there is more darkness in this classic metal style than some modern genres, whilst ‘Unholy’ is an anthem in lyrics, riffs and singalong power. Dendera have more to them than meets the eye and have proven that we should make no assumptions of throwbacks when we see the tag ‘heavy metal’ in 2015.

Rating: 9/10

Links: http://metalboxrecordings.com/
           http://www.dendera.co.uk/
           https://www.facebook.com/DenderaUK

Album Review; Dead Existence - Endless Misery

Released Via Black Bow Records
Genre: Doom/Crust Metal

Track Listing:

1. Consume
2. End Devoured By Beginning
3. ...
4. Worthless
5. Tear Apart The Veil
6. Obsidian Black
7. Delusion Of Hope
8. Regretamine

Dead Existence have been making waves, indeed. This record displays why; through a combination of frantic sludgy metal, a definite punk mentality, and a hefty slab of doom metal, Dead Existence have a musical Frankenstein that many people within the echelons of the UK scene’s more influential people will grasp onto with both hands. Lest we forget, doom and sludge metal are ruling the UK metal underground at the moment. However, where many other bands that we see absolutely everywhere at the moment seem to be a tad formulaic, there’s an element of liveliness to Dead Existence through which you can hear some soulful playing and writing. Neurosis are clearly in this group’s list of influences, as shown by the sprawling, ever-shifting nature of this record. End Devoured By Beginning’ starts off with some jazzy drumming and very low-key guitar playing, but it soon bursts into a leviathan-sized riff, complete with furiously barked vocals and more drumming that simply will not be tied down for too long. Naturally, very long songs are the agenda of the day, with all but two of these tracks ducking under the five minute mark. As the album title would suggest, depressive hopelessness is on the mind of Dead Existence, but rather than wallowing stupidly through endless doom metal monotony, Dead Existence choose to seethe for a duration of time before exploding into fury, and as they do this, many interesting musical ideas come to the surface. This is doom metal with a fire in its belly, and I’ll be keeping an eagle’s eye on this band.

Rating: 8/10

Links: https://www.facebook.com/DeadExistenceuk
           http://www.blackbowrecords.com/

Album Review; EscapeTheCult - All You Need To

Independent Release
Genre: Progressive Metal


Track Listing:

1. Backfired
2. Clandestine
3. I'm Absolute
4. Feel The Flight
5. Tired Of The Past
6. This Time Will Come
7. Where No Grown Up Grapes

While some other super groups end up sounding like an unimaginative, clumsy melding of different well-known bands, EscapeTheCult is an entity unto itself. The band is comprised of Primus/A Perfect Circle drummer Tim Alexander, King Diamond guitarist Mike Wead, vocalist Matthieu Romarin of Uneven Structure, and the band’s mastermind, Kamlath bass player Peter G. Shallmin. This cauldron of musical excellence combines to form one of the most multifaceted records you’ll hear in 2014.

‘All You Need To’ has a beautifully soulful quality to it that feels organic from note to note. Nothing on this album feels forced, and yet there’s so much delivered within the seven tracks. There are plenty of metal riffs and guitar solos, there are more ambient, almost new wave tinges, and a lot of jazz influence to be heard. This melting pot is nicely topped off with Romarin’s smooth yet powerful singing voice.

There’s a wide array of emotional connotation on show here; ‘Clandestine’ has an innocent joyfulness to it. Then there’s the more brooding and thoughtful ‘I’m Absolute’. ‘Feel The Flight’  is a brilliantly realised song; uplifting with hope and full of spirit, which can be as easily credited to the more subtle nuances of the music as to the sumptuous vocal melody. To say there’s a lot going on is an understatement, yet everything has enough breathing space, preventing the songs from getting bogged down.

All too often an album is professed to take the listener on a journey, but ‘All You Need To’ does exactly that, and it achieves this through the purest means. This is not a record that will try pretentiously to challenge your perceptions of what heavy music can be, instead this is four very achieved musicians coming together to create art, and like all accomplished artworks it will draw you in again and again. Here’s hoping that this is not a flash in the pan, as it would be great to see what else EscapeTheCult are capable of in the future.

Rating: 8/10

Links: https://www.facebook.com/EscapeTheCvlt?fref=ts
           https://escapethecult.bandcamp.com/releases

Album Review; Darkness Divided - Written In Blood

Released Via Victory Records
Genre: Metalcore


Track Listing:

1. Severance
2. The Shepherd's Hands
3. A Well Run Dry
4. The Hands That Bled
5. The Descent
6. Eternal Thirst
7. Withering Kingdom
8. Remnants
9. The Will Of Man
10. Interlude
11. Divine Mercy

There are two sides to this album. On the one hand; their metalcore style has been done to death! Everything from the overall tone of the songs to the bounce-along drum beats and chugging breakdowns. The vocals are mostly uninspiring and predictable. Almost every clean melody is even in the same key as the bands that come before this. The song structures are tired and do nothing to get you interested, ‘The Hands That Bled’ being a prime example. A lot of what is on show is shameless repetition of things we have heard since the turn of the century and is more likely to invoke a sigh of exasperation than anything else, especially when the short interlude tracks come into play. Every trap that metalcore bands can fall into, Darkness Divided fall hard. There are plenty of flourishes that are clearly a product of clever studio tricks, and the overall mix of the album is very pretty and pristine, but this doesn’t make up for the bulk of the material itself.

On the other hand, there are scattered amounts of interesting guitar lines and the odd breakdown here and there are genuinely heavy, showing a Slipknot influence on tracks like ‘The Will Of Man’, which has a quirky sound at the breakdowns. There’s occasional proficiency shown in the guitar lines that is frustratingly underutilized. These few points are needles in a poorly packed hay bale, and it’s albums like ‘Written In Blood’ which show metalcore is on its last legs.

 

Rating: 2/10

 

Links: https://www.facebook.com/darknessdivided

           https://www.victoryrecords.com/

Album Review; Dark Mirror Ov Tragedy - The Lunatic Chapters Of Heavenly Creatures

Released Via Wormholedeath Records
Genre: Symphonic Black Metal

Track Listing:

1. Thy Sarcophagus
2. Unwritten Symphony
3. Dancing In The Burning Mirror
4. Ichnography On Delusion
5. Virtuoso Of The Atmosphere
6. Perish By Luminos Dullness
7. The Constellation Of Shadows
8. The Name Of Tragedy
9. The Noumenon I Carved

 

This band’s fourth release contains nine tracks in total, and those nine tracks are full to the brim of gothic charm, classical influence and sharp instrumentation. There are a lot of ingredients here to appeal to fans of different strains of metal; there’s some decent riffs and shred-heavy guitar solos that deliver weight and fury to the sound, while violin and keyboards offer a dark, seductive beauty. This contrast makes for a very multi-dimensional listen. Take the standout track ‘Dancing In The Burning Mirror’, which shifts well between the two extremes over its nine minute duration.

Each seventh of this South Korean band clearly knows their role very well, as this album displays Dark Mirror Ov Tragedy to be a cohesive unit. It’s all too easy for a band trying to meld so many different styles together to sound like a clumsy mishmash, but this album shows the band’s compositional skills. The vocal shrieks may sound thinner than most black metal fans would like, but each rasp cuts through the heavy mix of music well enough. The three minute acoustic interlude ‘Virtuoso of the Atmosphere’ doesn’t feel essential to the album’s flow, especially when ‘Perish by Luminos Dullness’ could have easily carried the album onwards with good panache.

Dark Mirror Ov Tragedy have shown an elegant and broad-minded approach to extreme metal that the underground scene would do well to learn from. It’s not perfect, but it’s far from boring.

Rating: 7/10

Links: https://www.facebook.com/darkmirrorovtragedy
           http://www.wormholedeath.com/

Album Review; Dagoba - Tales From The Black Dawn

Released Via earMusic
Genre: Groove/Industrial Metal


Track Listing:

1. Epliogue
2. The Sunset Curse
3. Half Damn Life
4. Eclipsed
5. Born Twice
6. The Loss
7. Sorcery
8. O, Inverted World
9. The Dawn
10. Morning Light

Just when grand opening of ‘Epilogue’ makes you think that this album is going to explode into a huge stomper of a song, it becomes a let-down to hear that there is something a little soulless about ‘The Sunset Curse’. For all it’s industrial elements, it doesn’t deliver the right punch in the face that such a sound usually does. The symphonic elements are alright, if a little uninspiring, but the low-end guitar notes don’t sit high enough in the mix to give the song the ability to curb-stomp you. The same thing applies to ‘Half Damn Life’. Vocally, the shouts are decent enough, though they lack the kind of characteristics needed to embed the songs in your mind, whilst the clean vocals are like a cheese grater to the ears. The songs are presented in a tight enough manner, but there is just something missing. It also becomes apparent that Dagoba are a bit of a one-trick pony by the time ‘Eclipsed’ kicks in. Every song on the record has not just a similar feel, but the exact same feel, which truly stunts the growth of the record. We all have the bands from whom we want to hear a specific sound, but a band like Dagoba, who cite such a wide range of musical influences from classical music right to black, death and power metal, should be putting these tools to use in order to create an album with a lot more dynamic capabilities than this. Poor songwriting and a lack of imagination is the downfall here. Hopefully, Dagoba can do better next time.

Rating: 2/10

Links: https://www.facebook.com/dagoba13
           http://www.ear-music.net/en/label/

Album Review; Fear Factory - Genexus

Released Via Nuclear Blast
Genre: Industrial Death Metal


Track Listing:

1. Autonomous Combat System
2. Anodized
3. Dielectric
4. Soul Hacker
5. Protomech
6. Genexus
7. Church Of Execution
8. Regenerate
9. Battle For Utopia
10. Expiration Date


Fear Factory are unique within the metal scene. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of another band that sounds like them. Their long career has seen them go through highs and lows. The most recent high being 2010's 'Mechanize', which was a complete tour-de-force, backed up by the cannonade percussion of Gene Hoglan. Since then, Hoglan left the band and 2012 saw the release of 'The Industrialist', which was a fractured affair. Not a terrible album by any measure, but it definitely had something missing at its core. It lacked that certain spark that helped previous Fear Factory albums breathe and grow. For their new record, Cazares and Bell brought in Malignancy drummer Mike Heller.

As it happens, Heller was a great choice. He gels in well with Dino Cazares' mechanical, down-tuned riffing. Over this, frontman Burton C. Bell's barks and snarls weave their magic over opening track 'Autonomous Combat System', which begins this record's story of sentient machines living among mankind, and all its questions of religion, mortality, climate control and the essence of being human.

Without a doubt the music is very familiar to anybody who has heard Fear Factory, and there isn't much new to hear on this record, save for on the final track 'Expiration Date', which sees Fear Factory take us on an ambient journey. Before that, though, it is staccato riffs and triplet-based drumming wound super-tight and topped off with roomy choruses that feature the always superbly produced clean vocals of Bell. However, what helps this album is that the song writing has a lot more soul within it, it's been thought out more but not forced. The whole entity flows really well and each song has its strengths. It sounds like the album that 'The Industrialist' tried to be, and at times even sounds better than 'Mechanize', which is saying something since that album was one of my favourites of that year.

'Dielectric', 'Soul Hacker', 'Protomech' and 'Church Of Execution' are all the kind of powerful, pulverizing and thought-provoking metal songs that really bring an album like this to life. It goes without saying that the moral questions of Artificial Intelligence have been a hot topic over the last number of years as mankind seems to move swiftly towards that particular moral crossroads. 'Genexus', with its description of mechanization being a part of the next step in mankind's evolution shows how this band have presented the case both for and against this issue, while bearing the rebellious metal connotations within the songs, aimed at political systems, dehumanization and religion. Fear Factory are sharp again, back on track again, ready to grind your ears into dust again.

Rating: 9/10

Links: http://fearfactory.com/
           http://www.nuclearblast.de/en/