Amorphis- The Karelian Isthmus

Amorphis were originally a Finnish death metal band, whose career progression is best summed up by this Metal Archives description of their genre: Progressive/Death/Doom Metal (early), Modern Rock/Melodic Metal (later).

The Karelian Isthmus is their first full-length, and it is in no way a "modern rock" album. And yet... Knowing what we know today, that Amorphis are wussy at heart, that they took the shortest distance between artistic integrity and the almighty dollar (or whatever the Finnish currency is), should we listen to this album differently?

The 1990s must have been a strange time for metal. In an earlier era, "selling-out" meant Celtic Frost releasing the quasi-hair metal album Cold Lake.. but at a later period bands like Opeth and Dimmu Borgir obviously felt they could "make it" while remaining within the metal underground, producing flagrantly gimmicky music. And then there are a number of bands who sit in the middle ground of this distinction. The Karelian Isthmus belongs with the first Katatonia album, Dark Funeral, At the Gates' Slaughter of the Soul, and Edge of Sanity--respectable, but hopelessly cheesy and pretentious.

The problem with any excessively "melodic" metal is that, because these people aren't Mozart, everything tends to blur together after a while. This is true with all Candlemass-influenced doom metal, with all In Flames/Dark Tranquility Swedish death metal, with Iron Maiden, with Viking Metal, with the dreaded Norsecore in Black Metal, etc. etc. It becomes impossible to place any melody within a given song. Everything just becomes one stream of vaguely hummable mid-tempo. One wager of this blog is that the best metal music is that which succeeds in being endlessly "melodic" without falling into this trap. To that end, I nominate Metallica, King Diamond, Carcass, and Emperor. Obviously a number of different things are meant by "melody" in that list. I don't have time to go into it now.

Amorphis in this respect are like a shitty Bolt Thrower. Every song works, and they are easy to follow, but why it wasn't all just one big song... or why they didn't take any lessons in narrative songwriting that would modulate the mood and take us away from the endless ambience here... who knows. One of my favorite descriptors for good metal music is "endlessly inventive." Let's just say that Amorphis are NOT.

So. This is a same-y record, but it's the best one they made, and you can listen to it all the way through.

Rating: 2.5/5 (** 1/2) stars
Best songs: All the same

Pestilence- Consuming Impulse

I've always wanted to like this album. The cover is cool, the title is smarter than a lot of death metal album titles, and it is precisely the thrashy, riffy Euro-metal that I love. It's not too far off from early Death, Possessed, Slayer, the first Morbid Angel, Massacra, etc. On the other hand, no one would confuse this with Sepultura, Deicide, Obituary, Incantation, Entombed, Gorguts...



So, this is fairly early (1989) death metal that has a lot of thrash elements, but also a lot of the progressive and technical aspects of thrash, such that even in its origin in an earlier style it is already moving beyond itself. This would be borne out on the next album, Testimony of the Ancients, which has keyboards and other such trappings of sophistication.

I say, "I've always wanted to like this album," because I hate the way it is recorded, and it has been in my collection for years collecting dust. The vocals cut across the guitar sound too much. It is hard to get used to. Contrast with the Cancer album Death Shall Rise, and you'll hear what--without too great a difference--is lost in the murkiness and flatness here.

Even after numerous listens, though, and with the songs all being familiar to me, it is hard to enter into the record, to give oneself over to it. Unlike many metal records which are intentionally odd or technical, and can feel like "exercises," Consuming Impulse is obviously attempting to popularize itself. I have a similar feeling about Incantation. Except with Incantation, I feel that there is something obvious that I am missing: either something dumb or high-concept. In the case of Pestilence, I see exactly what they are doing, but as though it is an action in which I cannot interfere or even sympathize. Perhaps you will know what I mean if you think of watching TV, and sitting through 20 or so minutes of a suspense film. You are not confused... you just don't care, since you will never know what happened in the first part of the film. No matter how good it is, you cannot enter into it.

Pestilence have an advantage over most death metal bands, and over most death metal listeners, in being obviously intelligent--something like the opposite of Obituary. Their riffs are uniquely arty without being jazzy or weak, and constitute their own trademark (along the lines of Slayer's famous riff style). This album is still growing on me, because I keep coming back to it, but I can't say yet that I understand how to enjoy it.

Score: 3.5/5 stars (*** 1/2)

Best songs: "Suspended Animation," "Out of the Body," "Reduced to Ashes"

Behemoth- Satanica

One strange assumption made by underground bands (in all genres) is that there is a continuum of "catchiness" or "accessibility" along which they have intentionally situated themselves. A band imagines that, because they are playing Brutal Death Metal, they are closing off the "obvious" and friendly melodies that they (naturally) would be writing, if they were, say, a pop-punk band.

Nothing could be further from the truth. You see this by the boring and pedestrian albums that a band makes whenever they try to "sell out"-- surprise, surprise, they aren't as good as The Beatles, and they can write riffs which are only *so* good.

Behemoth play a very commercial, unintimidating, well-produced, image-conscious style of death metal. But despite the "obvious" pandering nature and (relative!) accessibility of this style... despite what should make this music user-friendly and "arena-sized"... despite all this, I find Behemoth to be quite forgettable and not big enough. I suspect that the calculation which led them to play in *this* style at the same time hinders the song-writing from the natural ebullience of creativity which produced, say, Metallica's Ride the Lightning, Judas Priest's Sad Wings of Destiny, or Graveland's Thousand Swords.

It may seem that I am saying the boring thing, "This lacks soul because it is so calculating." But it is rather that the calculation undoes itself... What is supposed to be huge is rather never as absurdly catchy and over-the-top as a less self-conscious band (say, Sacramentum). If this were completely "manufactured" and was still outsized and cartoonish, like the Ulver album Nattens Madrigal, I would be happier. Instead, Behemoth stop short--they make tepid, pleasant music that is neither goofy enough to be fun, nor uncompromising enough to be creative/interesting.

All that being said, there are some good riffs on this album, which is an astonishingly short 35 minutes. But because it is neither challenging nor a rockin' good time, you do not find yourself necessarily wanting more.

Score: 3.5/5 (*** 1/2)

Best songs: "Ceremony of Shiva," "Lam"

Carnage- Dark Recollections

This album came out when I was 7 years old, so when I came to it much later, it had to compete with every subsequent development in music. The "importance" of a record can of course never be a substitute for a boring listening experience, and while Carnage would be important in terms of many bands that I love (Carcass, Darkthrone, Entombed), their sole album has never caught on with me.

The whole Swedish Death Metal sound has always struck me as monotonous and formulaic. While I appreciate the blending of Discharge-style hardcore with death metal, the bands in this style forego the sense of dynamics and narrative which the American death metal bands (Death and Morbid Angel especially) took over from thrash metal--in comparison with which, Entombed are a bit "same-y."

The slow pace (for death metal), the consistent and boring atmosphere, the ridiculous chainsaw guitar tone, the guitar solos that are all the same... the entire genre is distilled into this one album, but instead of (as might be the case with another record) being able to forgive the faults of an entire genre in their first instantiation, this record does not *benefit* from its unifying tendencies. Instead, I put it on and think, after a few seconds: "Oh... THIS."

One thing that might mislead listeners is that the band never slips up: every song is consistent in quality; the genre conventions are completely adhered to; as an album it might even be "well-paced"... but like a fractal in mathematics, it looks the same no matter how "close" or "far" one's attention is set. As background music, it is background music---a heavy, thundering roar. But when one really puts one's ear up to it and pays attention.... it is still a heavy, thundering, consistent roar. You can wait the entire album's length waiting for "neat parts" or for any of the record to differentiate itself.

Now, that could be a general (naive) criticism of death metal, but what I mean here is that the TEXTURE is not different from the "big picture"... unlike, say, Suffocation, where repeated listens bring out nuances *from* a general chaos, with Carnage the surface close-up is not any more rewarding than the general impression. In fact they are the same.

As a review of this CD, I should add that (like the Nihilist demos) the demo tracks appended here have a certain raw charm that has been leveled-down for the "Sunlight Studios Sound."

Score: 3/5 stars (***)

Best songs: any will do equally well

originally written for http://payingattentiontometal.blogspot.com

Suffocation- Blood Oath

I sold my copy of the last Suffocation album (s/t), not because it was horrible, but because the "vibe" was really awful. I'll cite some lyrics:

Stop talking to me...
My father once told me to shut up, shut up

Do I know you?...
Where do I belong?
Shut up, shut up you...

Whereas the better style of death metal lyrics is represented by these *other* Suffocation lyrics:

The structure collapses, spewing forth mutation.
Plague bathes the earth from infected skies.
Chaotic saturation into the pores of existence.
Breeding the spawn.
Effigy awake in its mummified region.

If I can be clever about this: what makes death metal lyrics tolerable is their abstractness, lacking the I & You of rock music--because all of this is being shouted at full volume. When someone is yelling "Shut up!" or "I want to kill you!", the effect is lost, and I am snapped back into the reality that "these are sounds I would avoid having shouted at me in real life."

Since Suffocation's singer has begun to enunciate better, the decline of their lyrics into unpleasant personal rage has become distracting to the listener (i.e. one does not have to consult the lyrics sheet); I also feel that this decline is typical of the not-being-with-it that afflicts older bands.

One assertion of this blog as a whole is that one can tell whether music is good or bad--there isn't some special degree required. You put on old Suffocation--it's amazing. You put on the new Suffocation--but instead of trying to hold it up to their old sound, to look for errors, to make sure that it is "consistent,"--ask, "Is it amazing?"

And the answer is obviously that it's not. Enjoying music shouldn't have to be work.

Given the template established by previous albums, and one's "training" in the art of listening to Suffocation, one obviously will have the appearance of satisfaction... and perhaps for those experiencing the band/style for the first time, this will be a revelation. But the first few times I put this on, I was staring my eyes out of my head asking whether it was good or not. And that just shouldn't be a question; it never was a question with their devastating earlier work.

On this album, Suffocation have bounced back from the woeful uncoolness of their last record, but at best they have achieved a confusion between what *appears* to be a proficient and rewarding album, and the actual *rewards* (neat parts!) of such a record. Only for those with no need of paying attention to metal, who will be satisfied with the trappings. Paradoxically here, paying attention means: knowing what pleasure (hardly the most "attentive" state) is, apart from the "up-close" of the coherent and professional texture one is presented with.

Score: 3 stars/5 (***)

Best songs: "Images of Purgatory," "Dismal Dream"

Graveland- Following the Voice of Blood

In a career of strong albums (Celtic Winter, Thousand Swords, Memory and Destiny), this is Graveland's strongest; it also has the dubious distinction of being their worst-recorded. As each subsequent album has been less adventurous than the last, Following the Voice of Blood stands as a peak in weirdness and is distinctive within their catalog.

To begin with, the guitar tone is an unprecedented (in metal!) combination of an over-the-top flange effect with jangly light distortion. There is no "crunch" to the sound, and (I can't speak very technically about this) the strings can all be heard individually during the fast strumming. Suffice to say, this produces a weird "underwater" sound which does not at all cohere during the fast parts, and is off-putting to most metal ears. Combined with drummer Capricornus' unique sense of timing, the execution of these songs is a real disaster: they won't be winning over casual listeners with this one.

As a student of Graveland, I can say that their albums are always sequenced impeccably. This is true here. The album opens with the obligatory synth intro, and "White Hand's Power" is the shortest full song on the album, at 8:33. It holds your attention, but things really get going with the incoherent blasting of "Thurisaz," which is the next logical step in minimalism from Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger release: the only thing similar that comes to mind is Veles' Black Hateful Metal, which takes this minimalism to its high concept extreme (with similarly flanged-out weird production).

Now, normally, the fast parts are not a Graveland strength--and after this album, they basically give up on blast-beats in drumming, to concentrate on a more "epic" Bathory style; which is why you *cannot* miss out on this album: the fast riffs played here match anything on Pure Holocaust or Transilvanian Hunger. I'm thinking especially of "Thurisaz," "And the Horn was Sounding Far Away," and "Fed by Beasts." Of course, all the other trappings of a Graveland album are here, too, but what makes Following the Voice of Blood the best Graveland album is the slurred, clumsy melodies cited above.

It's easy to see why this bizarre, horrible-sounding, folky, inept, jangly, non-Satanic-themed release did not become the future of metal. Not that it is so brainy or avant-garde, but the extremely enjoyable melodies and songs here are buried underneath every contingent "turn-off," and is completely lacking in those qualities which make extreme metal appealing to teenage boys.

Score: 5/5 stars (*****)
Best songs: "Thurisaz," "And the Horn was Sounding Far Away," "Fed by Beasts"

the DVD that comes with Incantation- Onward to Golgotha

"Why didn't they release this DVD separately? Why does it come free with the CD?"

Because it sucks.

This DVD is interesting mainly as an FAQ: Did anyone attend Incantation shows? No. How did they dress? Always the same. Did they move around a lot while playing? No. Do the band members ever even look at each other? No.

Incantation's first two studio albums both suffer from cavernous, obscure recordings, so in theory a live performance would cut through any questions of sound quality, and capture the songs in their intensity and as-executed: there is always something artificial about death metal albums. And these 3 performances do all that, to some degree--but with the qualification that the videos here are essentially unwatchable and also unlistenable. They are all single-source VHS recordings, so the sound is very scrunched together, blown-out, and far from the impact any death metal band aims for in a performance. The best is the "Flashes" show, which is shot from a higher vantage point, and the guitar and drums can be discerned reasonably well (vocals muffled).

But, complain about this as I may, it really isn't about the sound quality or the performance style. At heart, I don't think I like or understand Incantation. I don't "get" it. Are they too cerebral? I hate to admit it, but this might be the case. They don't make it easy for me: lots of changes, atonal solos, few choruses, more "doomy" parts than breakdowns, completely unpleasant but generic vocals. Like Obituary, Incantation seem to have missed out on the original intensity of metal: the quality of up-tempo rock that Metallica have in common with the MC5. Incantation never "rock," no matter how fast they play. 

If you want to see a few really ugly guys standing on a stage making barely audible, complicated, uncatchy music that makes Deicide seem extremely charming-- this is for you.