Once more the Swiss-American band Modern Rites releases a cascading crescendo, a genre-defying album. The music is as intense as it is dense. It contains some of the riffing warmth of Death Metal, the soaring beauty that can be found in the tremolos and synths in Atmospheric Black Metal, and the churning depths of Industrial Metal.
One member of the duo is the multi-instrumentalist Berg from the Swiss band Aara who has taken the moniker Katalyst for this musical project. He provides the gushing and surging guitar riffs and deep tremolos that induce heavy and compact arpeggios that form the solid stem of the music. The other member is multi-instrumentalist Jonny Warren from the US band Kuyashii, who uses the moniker Archytekt here. He handles the relentless, fierce, and intricate rhythm section as well as the soaring melodic synths that lift the somber music with reflective sanguinity.
I am not sure, but it seems like - with both their albums in the rearview mirror - they have taken monikers that subtly describe what they do. The extensive and dense guitar work becomes a catalysator for the entangled textured construction Archytekt has built with synths and rhythm, embracing the strong growling vocals. Nevertheless, this album comes out at first listen as a barrage of dense Death Metal with the aggressiveness of Black Metal before you begin to notice the layers, the sublime melodic themes, the thundering of low-end tremolos, and some optimistic yearning from the keys.
As with the previous album, the opening track, ”Prelude”, is a couple of minutes of soft completive Ambient music that eases in with a soft melodic piano preparing melodic themes that will rise in the massive cascades to come.
Then the head-on rites begin with ”Endless” at a whiplashing pace: relentless riffs, intense rhythms somewhere between Djent and blast with glistens of cymbals. The massive music embraces the growls and out of this melodic synth sounds emanate hovering above the music, sometimes in choir mode. The ever-evolving rhythm section intensifies the music, pushing for speed as it seems like the thick flowing synths are trying to hold back a bit, making it utterly engaging. They surge above with a glissading melodic theme that changes the sonics of this powerful juggernaut. The music pans out and takes a breath charging going forward once more with a slower rhythmic pace for a while until it spreads out to give room for synths and whispering vocals until the rhythm section is back fast pacing in the wide sonics. It melts together over the drums with dense riffs that have a subtle undulating flow before fading away.
In this vein, the rites continue. But not in a boring repetitive way. Each song is carefully constructed with twists and turns among the monolithic sounds that emanate from the music. On “Lost Lineage” you are treated to this through the song’s aggressive pace. As the rhythm section keeps up their Djent speed with blast elements, the guitars shift to longer riffs before an abrupt break where there is silence except for some picking on the lower guitar string. And then the music surges back and you are sucked into the immense soundscape with added melodic synths.
In the song ”Veil of Opulence” there are some eerie vibes with a dark and heavy tremolo coming from the guitar driving the music forward before the latter takes a breath when the synths pan out and the drums kick start the dense music again as it rises into the next part of the song eventually finding a melodic theme to race forward embracing the vocals. It is undulating, it is forceful, and with a hidden beauty deep in it as the wavey condensed music surges forward with layers of sound before it pans out in a wide synth scape disappearing below a horizon.
There is a whiff of Industrial Metal in the previous song, but on ”Becoming” the opening paves the way for a song building on the basis of Industrial Metal pairing the expressive rhythm with the synths and the sounds embracing the stem of heavy riffs, sometimes at a staccato pace or via fast tremolos. In one section the fast staccatos are surrounded by sounds from the synths and a higher-pitched guitar rises from the leaden sonics; it pans out to wide rhythmic sonics pushing forward leaving the industrial soundscapes behind until it sinks into a repetitive and pulsating part just before the drums fire it up to push it forward again with the sounds of Industrial Metal lingering in the dense riffs above the growls. The song´s heavy soundscape flourishes out toward the end and, again, picks up the Death Metal vibe that lingers in this music.
There are many twists and turns, swells and collapses, and rushes on this album delivered at a breathtaking pace. It could have been a dense muffled thing, but far from it - there are cascading crescendos forming captivating melodic themes. As the last song ”Philosophenweg” illustrates, where the higher-pitched guitar is blended with the dense music, introducing melodic synths. In these multi-faceted layers, there are always glimpses of lighter elements. A kind of reflectiveness is induced in the music by the higher-pitched guitar and the synths in between the tighter parts. Something that might reflect walking along Heidelberg´s Philosophenweg where philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel have strolled taking in the view of Heidelberg and its beautiful surroundings as they mulled over their philosophical ideas.
