There are many ways the construct of genre can seemingly work against an album. It’s usually all the peripheral elements; the artwork, the grammar choice, even things like handwritten lyrics. Many don’t care about iconoclasm in a bloodied-up slaughterhouse with meat strung up in a row. They want the burger; they tell you to hold the extras. And those folks not looking for wild spices in their meal or dwelling in conversation after ‘ are likely to get up from the table and travel their merry way to their next destination.
All this to say that perdurance is a clear labor of love with every intentional detail accounted for. From the lengths of the silences’to the naming of the tracks and album; from the cadences and codas ‘ to the literal and figurative breaths in the auditory aesthetics.
The trajectory of this album, which comes approximately six years after Brendan Sloan’s last work Grievous, transcends the notions of the Death Metal genre as we’ve come to know its seasoning and reasoning. It’s an album of risk, and plentiful reward for anyone wishing to digest, sit, and pour into the liner notes and lyrics. A bonafide emotional ride, which for the initiated and uninitiated alike, may recall the anguish of mister Steevo Hurdle on Gorguts’ Obscura; the ingenuity of Swan’ on Edge of Sanity’s Moontower; coupled with the expressiveness of the Mongrain’s and Holdsworth’s of that connected world. The sequencing alone, along with the secret bonus, recalls a time when full album listens were received without interruption, with full submersion into the material, in awe, with headphones on or sitting on the bed, following along to the lyrics.
This is a ferocious one. If classical composition can feel ferocious. It is curious; if one feels that the gleam and luster of that death metal blade have dulled over the last decade, this blacksmithing is the leap into that magic. If these dark corridors entice your propensity to discover and uncover’this album is very much for you. A return to a certain form, that is simultaneously completely obliterated by the notion of what the future may hold in this genre. There are delicate sauces here; they’re tactile and they are complex; they are ‘baroque’ as a friend put it. With that said’every song is a ‘hit’ with and without the quotations. If the world listens intently ‘ this can be a watershed moment for the Heavy Metal cultural continuum as the namesake of the album suggests. In my recipe book, it very much is.
