Trancelike Void - Destroying Something Beautiful

Dual Review:




















Genre: Black Metal
Name: Trancelike Void
Album: Destroying Something Beautiful (2008)and Silhouettes of Misery (2010).
Deep Thought II

Thirteen posts and already I'm resorting to the same artists. Ah well.

Anyhoo, you may remember that last time I reviewed these Belgians, all the way back in April, I reviewed an EP of theirs, and, whilst it was good, it wasn't particularly great: 22 minutes and about 6 riffs. However, various sources informed me that I had picked a particularly unusal output for the duo, and I wasn't showing them in their true glory, so I promised a review of something else of theirs shortly.

And, as always, I forgot.


However, I went through my posts the other day to see what I'd promised you, and, sure enough there it was. A quick trip to the internet, and I have two reviews for you: the one I owed, plus interest.

Destroying Something Beautiful is Black Metal, but not in the syle of Abigail Williams. This is more abstract, more like Burzum or Lupus Nocturnus (both coming soon - well, soon-ish. Maybe a month). It's a mix of the heavy, pounding, slow, repetitious chords, distorted and layered on top of simple drums and new-age-esque, harmonious, abstract interludes, much shorter than their grittier partners. Also, for once, tracks labelled as interludes actually act as interludes, rather than just being a short sound clip they liked but couldn't actually fit anywhere else (I'm looking at you, Enter Shikari).

It is certainly more diverting than The Stone Pond, and keeps the attention far more easily. While it is perhaps slightly simpler - okay, significantly simpler in composition than that EP, which used more than three strings, I prefer it. This is mostly because it's just my thing - (mostly) instrumental, heavy, fairly depressing - and I can certainly see that people might not agree with me. However, this album has an advantage over its predecessor because it's possible to hear it without the volume raised to the maximum possible level.

Despite the interludes, which certainly create interesting diversions - and, in fact, even including them - this album remains probably far too simple for most people. The chords follow mostly the same patterns, with only the occasional diversion, the drums are simple and certainly aren't "driving", and the whole thing seems almost willing to fade into the background. Even the interludes only get your attention because they're not the same sequence on repeat. However, as I've said, this is what I like. It's my cup of tea (Earl Grey, no milk, no sugar, a little bit of lemon). I enjoyed it, especially the exceptionally atmospheric epilogue, which is closer to a none-acoustic Where The Trees Can Make It Rain


Silhouettes Of Misery, however, is much closer to that EP than Destroying Something Beautiful. For starters, it's acoustic, and therefore doesn't have those pulsing chords of Destroying Something Beautiful. It's based a lot more on simple, repeated riffs than heavy and distorted chords, although there are acoustic equivalents. But there is nothing to say on this album, really. I have just sat through the three-quarters of an hour it took me to play it through, and found nothing worth commenting on that makes it any different from Where The Trees Can Make It Rain. The only thing I can think of - and I'm really grasping at straws here - is that the drums appear more, but that's mostly because it's longer. There's nothing wrong with it, I didn't actively dislike it, but it just didn't do anything to grab my attention. It just made me sit and think (in this case, about html - how do I get one link to open two tabs?), and I that's probably the point. It certainly was a lot more effective in this regard than Destroying Something Beautiful, and I'm sure a lot of people like it. However, I'd only have it on as white noise, or as something peaceful if I were a hippy and wanted to meditate.

Overall, Trancelike Void are a band that, if not obsessively introspective themselves, certainly encourage their listeners to be. They do compose music that holds the attention like a sieve holds water, but when you return from the ether of your thoughts, you emerge into a calm and controlled auditory landscape, sterilised and peaceful, and fairly pleasant. That is what it's about, I suppose, and I'm sure many people find this helpful. However, I'm capable of thinking deeply without musical supplements, so certainly Silhouettes Of Misery isn't for me.

Summary: Calm thought-provoking music, but not something you can rock out to.
Rating: 7/10 and 6/10

Track listing:
Destroying Something Beautiful
1. Prelude: Descent
2. Part I: Everything Falls
3. Interlude I: Daydream
4. Part II: Fragile Conciousness
5. Interlude II: Nightmare
6. Part III: Total Desolation
7. Epilogue: Escape

Silhouettes Of Misery
1. Paranoid Melancholy
2. One Bridge Drowned
3. Blood
4. An Essence Of Tragedy

Myspace

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Abigail Williams - Legend EP

Genre: Black Metal
Name: Abigail Williams
Album: Legend (2007)
And mark this — let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you.

This was a landmark moment for me. Back in the good old days, when the HMV metal section was three units wide, and they had bands other than the big four and Taking Back Sunday, I found this for but a trifle and snapped it up. I later found where I'd heard the name before - Arthur Miller's The Crucible, based on the Salem Witch Trials, hence the quote above (On a side note, it's a good play. Go out into the real world and see it some time). Anyway, I had my first black metal album, and I've never regretted it.

It is, unfortunately, quite short - 20 minutes, 5 songs - but it is brilliant. The Conqueror Wyrm is, for me, the flagship track. Its introduction catches you like a sever dose of cholera, and the sudden slow section stop your heart with sorrowful sublimity. Then as the song fades away and you are left with a crackling recording of an aged man, your pulse slowly fades away, flat-lining into the silence. Yes, this song probably isn't good for your health, but nothing fun ever is. Like catching bullets in the gap between your ear and your skull. That would explain why, with only one full-length release, they've already got 18 ex-members.

But its not just the one track that's awesome. The piano in Watchtower is exquisite, the vocals permanently sound just like a banshee "sucking a scream to stab me with", the drummer is probably the first octopus-human hybrid, and the guitar lines are simply superb. The lyrics aren't perhaps the most unique, but they're certainly not bad.

As always, however, there are moments where you suspect that they felt obliged to make the track longer but couldn't come up with anything, so just put some notes together and played them really fast. But fortunately these moments are few and far between, and even when they do occur, they're blissfully brief, and, at any rate, no worse than plenty of other bands.

In short, the whole thing is rather good, and is what got me into Black Metal in the first place. Go have a listen, and you'll see why they have always been in my ten favourite bands.

Summary: Melodic Black Metal, done very well
Lyrical Themes: Nonsensical metaphors in general, based on death, darkness and the cosmos. Some simply based around quotes.
Rating: 8/10

Track listing:
1. From A Buried Heart
2. Like Carrion Birds
3. The Conqueror Wyrm
4. Watchtower
5. Procession Of The Aeons

Myspace (no songs from this EP)
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Changes to Format.

Hey,

This is mostly a general administrative post, for my own benefit as much as yours.

Point the first:
I am aware that I have promised much an delivered little. As a result, with as many as possible in the next week (before Friday), I will review the following, which I have promised before:

Abigail Williams - Legend (oft mentioned, but never actually reviewed)

Celtic Frost - Monotheist

Cult Of Luna - Salvation

Drop Dead, Gorgeous - Worse Than A Fairy Tale

Throes Of Dawn - The Great Fleet Of Echoes

and

A full-length release by Trancelike Void

Point the Second:
Following these reviews, I will then no longer review everything I upload. I will probably do about one a week, and this will be on the Friday. The reason for this is twofold - firstly, it means I only need to review albums I actually have something interesting to say about, rather than everything that I'd like to put up, and secondly, it will enable me to post more music. This means I can put up discographies, or more famous albums that you can find better reviews of elsewhere online.
For the music which I am not reviewing, however, I will still write a paragraph or two so you know what you're downloading, rather than just clicking the link and hoping.
This will start some time in September.

Point the third:
You may have noticed that, as of my Lamb Of God review, I have moved to Mediafire to store my files. This is because Rapidshare and Megaupload, my previous hosts, do not allow parallel downloads, and force wait times before and after file downloads. Mediafire does not, so I assumed you would prefer it. To see everything that I have uploaded from 19/07/2010, go to http://www.mediafire.com/echoswolf
I have also gone to scores out of 10, rather than 100, because 100 was fairly arbitrary: what's the difference between 85 and 86?
However, if I were to use decimal points, that would defeat the point, so, from now, only integer scores out of ten.

/admin

Echo's Wolf out
\m/\-.-/\m/

Lamb Of God - Sacrament

Genre: Death Metal

Name: Lamb Of God

Album: Sacrament (2006)

Virginia: where Death Metal is good

Now, as you may have guessed from previous reviews, I am not the biggest fan of Death Metal. I have the odd band that deserves its place on my iTunes - Opeth, for example, or Lair Of The Minotaur (although the latter is mostly because of the names - I mean, "Assassins Of The Cursed Mist" is just hilarious), but as a general rule, I shun Death Metal, making sure that it is kept alone in the corner of the room with the Dunce hat on its head. I don't like it much. In fact, that is somewhat of an understatement. I think Death Metal did for Metal what Stalin did for Communism.

There are, on Encyclopaedia Metallum over twenty-six thousand Death Metal bands, accounting for over 35% of the total number of bands on the website. By contrast, Thrash Metal has only 17 thousand, Heavy has only 11 and Power a mere 5 (they have 11 genres in total, so the mean value is about 6,000. Death metal has over 4 times this amount).
This is, of course, not counting the thousands more bands out there, as yet unsigned. The true figure is probably over thirty thousand, even being conservative. Death Metal is saturating its own market. To bring it closer to home, a friend of mine quit the band purely because it was Death Metal, and he realised that it was never going anywhere.

But why does this subgenre proliferate, whereas others remain confined to the shadows and lurk in the depths of obscurity? I think the answer is fairly simple - it's easy to play.
Most Death Metal songs are in commontime and are played in straight quavers, semiquavers and crotchets. Most Death Metal songs are riff-based and use repeated power chords as their main tune. Most Death Metal songs are short, most Death metal songs have a bass copying the guitar and most Death Metal songs have, in some form or another, the beat blast drumming. It is this kind of simplicity that often drives people to metal in the first place – they’re sick of hearing the same I-IV-V-I chord structure on the radio, with whichever band happens to be popular at the moment droning over the top about whichever girl the singer saw on the train going to the recording studio.

Let me assure you that I accept this is a generalisation. I know that not all bands are play in 4-4, not all bands keep to the same chord pattern for the whole song and not all bands have unoriginal and ancillary drums, but it is perfectly true for most Death Metal bands, and that cannot be disputed.
Everything about the songs is designed to sound difficult: Yes, the songs are fast, and yes, it is difficult to get up to that speed, but not that difficult – most guitarists or drummers can play at these speeds, and whilst they should be proud of this, it is not a unique feature – these are not a “select few” by any stretch of the imagination. The vocals are designed to sound hard to replicate, and yes they are – you can damage your vocal chords significantly by doing this, even to the point, supposedly, of throat cancer. They are difficult to do, in the same what that it’s difficult to swallow a live grenade whole – that doesn’t mean that it’s impressive.

But besides this, everything seems added-on to the main piece. Let’s look at it on an instrument by instrument basis. The Guitar is often just the same one or two simple riffs on repeat. The bass usually is just mirroring the guitar, and the drums are just there to add to the noise. The vocals – well, I’ll get onto them in a minute, if you can bear the suspense.

In short, the entire thing is just noise, with these things added on to give the pretence of music. Every instrument is there simply because it “needs” to be there. You couldn’t have a band without a guitar, so let’s throw something in for that. The same for bass, and the same for drums, and the same for vocals.

But the vocals themselves demand attention in their own right. Firstly, unlike most other genres, they are not poetic, nor are they designed to be. They are, often, prose. There is nothing wrong with that at all. But look at the contents:

My Latex Queen, by Dark Funeral
Latex queen - feel my tongue in deep
Whirls around - climax is almost found
I rise to my feet - erection slides in deep
I pound you hard - latex queen feels so sweet
Feels so sweet...

Psychopathologist, by Carcass
I like to slide my hand inside your stomach
And rip out the putrid remains,
Drink the pus and munch on the internal organs
Until all the casket is drained.

Necropedophile, by Cannibal Corpse
I begin the dead sex, licking her young, rotted orifice
I cum in her cold cunt, shivering with ecstasy
for nine days straight I do the same
She becomes by dead, decayed child sex slave
her neck I hack, cutting through the back
I use her mouth to eject

Another song, from the aforementioned band of my friend, was called “Trepanation”. For those of you who don’t know, that’s the practice of drilling holes in people’s heads to relieve headaches. And yes, it was described in graphic detail.

These lyrics are disgusting – intentionally so. And that is part of the problem. The whole point of Death Metal is “sticking it to the man”. It’s about dragging up the sordid elements of humanity, about the hypocrisy of society, about breaking free from social norms and doing your own thing – Anarchy. (Ironically, you’re not, because there are twenty six-thousand other bands doing the same thing, but that’s already been said). There’s nothing wrong with that. But instead of pointing out these problems, or commenting on them, they instead simply try to shock people. They want people to be revolted. They feel obliged to, as a Death Metal band. Occasionally, they put on a facade of intelligence by using long or scientific words – Putrefaction, enzyme, lecherous – but overall these add nothing – they are describing these things for the sake of it. They are easy to write about, and they have great effect. When you’re trying to add lyrics to a song, why not just fall back on this generic and unoriginal topic? It’s a quick, simple fix.

Now, I coul abide all this – I don’t complain about the Satanism or National Socialism abundant in Black Metal. I don’t complain about My Dying Bride’s “erotic” lyrics. I don’t complain about the more simplistic and dull melodies found in much Thrash metal – if it were not for one thing. Death Metal is seen as representative of all metal. And this infuriates me.

Ask any fan of The Killers or of Jay-Z or of Eminem what metal sounds like, and they will always, without fail, say that it is screaming and fast and loud. Never mind the fact that Metallica, the most famous metal band in the world (open to dispute, but I would say so) are not representative of this. Death Metal makes its mark – it crops up in the news as the reason why some teenagers have murdered some other teenager, for example, and people assume that all metal is like that. And that is simply not true. Not all metal is angry. Not every metalhead is a Satanist. We don’t all run round in corpse paint with knives in our hands trying to mutilate defenceless old ladies in Tesco before devouring the beaten heart with our recently-bought ketchup and chips. We are all tarnished with the same brush. And that is unfair.

So, in summary, the reasons I hate Death Metal are as follows:
1. It’s simple to the point of being boring
2. It’s far too dominant for its own good
3. It is designed purely to shock, and no thought that goes into either the lyrics or the music
4. It is seen as a representation of all metal, and hence people have preformed opinions about you when you say you listen to “metal”.
5. It’s not very good.

My apologies for this somewhat excessively long rant and for who disjointed it is. I will come back to it and edit it at some point. Now, onto the main business of the post.

After all this, you may be wondering why I have put Lamb of God up for your listening pleasure. It’s this simple: they don’t suck. They are one of the few Death Metal bands who, for one reason or another, don’t actually sound like the defacatory matter which their song is describing. The reasons in Lamb of God’s case are as follows. The riffs, whilst they are riffs, are interesting, and aren’t just simple chords on repeat. The lyrics actually have required some thought, and are about something the writer actually knows about, or has experienced (which I hope so much can’t be said about Cannibal Corpse). But, most of all, the drummer is a god.
This album in particular embodies all these features, so that is why I have posted it. Yes, it’s fairly old , but for those of you who haven’t heard any Lamb Of God before (do you live in a cave?), it’s a good starting point. But most of all, it proves that there is such a thing as good death metal
Enjoy!



Summary: Death Metal sucks, except for this album, and a very few others.
Lyrical Themes: Anger, Why Various Unnamed People Suck, Posers
Rating: 8/10

Track listing:
1. Walk With Me In Hell
2. Again We Rise
3. Redneck
4. Pathetic
5. Foot To The Throat
6. Descending
7. Blacken The Cursed Sun
8. Forgotten (Lost Angels)
9. Requiem
10. More Time To Kill
11. Beating On Death's Door

Myspace
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Saturnus - Martyre

Genre: Doom Metal

Name: Saturnus

Album: Martyre (2000)

Who says metal can't be soothing?

Saturnus, as far as I can discover, have very little particularly interesting or noteworthy about them, so I cannot fill this post with my usual random useless titbits of information, except for the fact that they have had 8 ex-guitarists, which, all things considered, is quite a lot.

Anyway, on to the main business of the day: the album itself. Whilst the band may not be noteworthy, the music certainly is. This starts, like all good Inspector Morse episodes, with a choir, vocalising an exceedingly plaintive tune, which immediately grabbed my attention - I'm a sucker for choirs, not least those who sing in Latin. This artfully arranged piece, cryptically named "7" is followed by the equally excellent "Inflame Thy Heart", which changes styles significantly - no more the choral majesty, but rise the growled death vocals, complete with obligatory raven and night references. The guitar line is exactly slow enough to maintain interest while inviting contemplation (compare with Sunn 0))) ). But the excellently stately fretwork is swiftly surpassed by the piano, wrapping up the song with ornate and sorrowful ease.

Track 3 is more brash and abrasive, and brings to mind My Dying Bride with its temptress-based lyrics, and, in short, is a sharp turn from the past tracks. This is followed by another contrast, and another, and the whole is soon less than the sum of its parts. Whilst this album is made up of excellent songs, they do not fit together - they are great individual songs, but this album has the feel more of a compilation than an album in its own right.

"Lost My Way" is, for example, close to thrash (not quite, but getting there), and whilst it is an excellent track, with amazing backing vocals and guitar riffs which demand, and receive, undivided attention, it's not quite what the album left you expecting.

The closer, however, does precisely what is required. The acoustic intro, followed by keyboard backing and suitably whispered devotions to some bright-eyed girl. It gives an excellent sense of closure, whilst leaving you wanting more (if you'll excuse the somewhat cheesy oxymoron).

As a whole, the album is worth a listen. The vocals, be they choir, clean or cathartic growls, are not, as on other albums, an obligitary addition, but complement the music very well; the drums are simplistic but effective; the guitar carries mournful music with ease and efficiency; in short, excellent doom metal.

Summary: A great introduction to Doom Metal. If you haven't heard any before, or are being recommended it, try this.
Lyrical Themes: Sorrow, Loss, Death, Temptresses
Rating: 7/10

Track listing:
1. 7
2. Inflame Thy Heart
3. Empty Handed
4. Noir
5. A Poem (Written In Moonlight)
6. Softly on the Path You Fade
7. Thou Art Free
8. Drown My Sorrow
9. Lost My Way
10. Loss (In Memoriam)
11. Thus My Heart Weepeth for Thee
12. In Your Shining Eyes

Myspace

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