It wasn’t hard for Those Who Lie Beneath to claim the throne of the heaviest deathcore band. An Awakening, their one and only record, is about as frightening a record as the subgenre ever produced, from its unnerving cover art to a visceral, tooth-and-nail sound that drew from the wells of death and black metal in large enough quantities to shame their competitors and chop the -core influences down to negligible levels. Somewhere along the way, depending on how you look at it, the band either lost members or consolidated; whatever the case, they became a three-piece and recorded what would go on to be one of the most jaw-dropping (and jaw-droppingly underappreciated) records of 2012 in Antichrist, three tracks of unadulterated, blistering death metal. With breakdowns and pig-squeals tossed out with the extraneous members, the core of the band was free to pursue its muses to their most brutal ends. The wait for a follow-up ever since has been all but excruciating.
It ended November 10, totalling five years since Those Who Lie Beneath became Vitriol. More than the name of the band has changed in the intervening period, but two quotes have come to define what’s presented on Pain Will Define Their Death more than any painstaking description of the maelstrom contained within it might. The first is a quote from Behemoth frontman Nergal, from around the time of the release of their career-defining record The Satanist, which I will have to paraphrase as I’m unable to find its origin: rather than approaching it with the meticulous, micromanagerial songwriting with which the band attacked Evangelion, The Apostasy, and so on, Behemoth largely wrote The Satanist by feeling and intuition, prizing emotion over technicality. This parallels comments Vitriol frontman Kyle Rasmussen made to Nine Circles for an artist profile, in which he states: It all starts with the riff. I am first and foremost a guitar player. I don’t have a process in the conventional sense. It’s all a matter of picking up the guitar and fucking around until I trip onto something that moves me. The other comes from Rasmussen himself. Prompted by a question regarding trends in the metal scene--“What do you see as some of the great things happening in metal and what are some of the worst things happening inside the scene right now?”--Rasmussen’s reply, which I will repeat here in full to avoid neutering the point, resonated with me like few other interviews. It functions as both an incisive critique on the current state of the genre and a mission statement, offering us a rare window on the mindset of Vitriol’s chief songwriter and insights into Pain Will Define Their Death that might not normally have occurred to a listener: Fuck the scene. To me “the scene” is synonymous with community. Metal, and its personal and subjective definition to me, has never been about community. It’s a solitary experience that has nothing to do with humanity. It is at odds with humanity. Metal is about a level of strength and commitment that transcends human nature. It’s about abandoning the standard of the human experience and being better, maintaining uncompromising integrity and an authentic identity and sense of self. It’s a superhuman philosophy. The metal scene is an oxymoron. For something that should be about pure self expression outside the clutches of cultural politics and trends to devolve into something so exclusive and totalitarian as the scene is a fucking tragedy. And this applies to any “scene.” You have to like the right bands, wear the right clothes, dislike the right bands, play the right gear, have the right aesthetic. Fuck you. I want nothing to do with it. I don’t want to sit at your table. I want to use your head as a stone while I climb over you to make something real. That’s the shit that speaks truth when the fickle trends ebb and flow. And I feel like that’s all there is now; a bunch of glorified renaissance fair kids playing dress up, romanticizing about generations and movements they had nothing to do with, writing records and riffs that were done better 20, 30, 40 years ago. It’s a joke. It’s a big party where metal, where music, is just background noise. It’s all socially driven and it’s repulsive. As far as positive things occurring in metal music today, I’d say there’s nothing exclusive to this moment in time. We’re stuck in a very regressive moment in extreme metal. It seems that every popular genre is steeped in some form of retro fetishism. I think there’s a time and place for that, but I prefer to look forward and covet bands that share my sentiment. Positivity and progression is and has always been reflected in the bands and artists that reject trends and create honestly. Whenever I find a band that glimmers in the rough like that and has something fresh and authentic about their sound it reinforces my passion and inspires me. Achieving that has only become harder with technology and how oversaturated the offerings of the genre have become. More room for weekend warrior copy cat bands to pump out records on the cheap. Before now the level of commitment, money, and time required to make a record really helped weed out those who weren’t really driven. Overall I feel the accessibility to creating and sharing music is a positive thing, it has just simply made it more difficult and rare to find shit worth listening to, much less financially supporting. There’s a barb for everyone here. The harshest sting is Ramussen’s comment on extreme metal’s ongoing “regressive moment” and “retro fetishism,” to which even Metal Lifestyle has made a small contribution in the American Metalcore Project, glorifying those “records and riffs that were done better 20, 30” years ago; it speaks also to death metal’s present fascination with “old school” death metal, a period so distinct that it’s been acronymized (OSDM) and aestheticized seemingly down to the last particle; and it speaks to thrash metal, which has all but eaten itself alive. Even the much buzzed-about Icelandic scene is, to paraphrase members of Svartidaudi, so indebted to Deathspell Omega (specifically their record Fas - Ite Maledicti in Ignem Aeternum) as to render it no less fetishistic--although we can be more flexible with that branch of extreme music, given its relative infancy. But to get caught up in that is to ignore his most valuable insight: there are bands that share his sentiment, who don’t want to sit at that table either, and who can be “fresh and authentic.” Certainly, Deathspell Omega must be one of those bands, as a few strands of their demented black metal are woven into Pain Will Define Their Death, but as Rasmussen notes, it’s more an influence than an instance of copycatting. This is what listening to Vitriol is like, which is quite unlike most new acts of 2017: while it’s clear that the band have influences, they remain only that. They’re bound to semi-conventional song structures not as a result of laziness, but because some conventions exist for a reason: they work, and they give the artist room to prove the soundness of their craft within a certain set of parameters before they begin dismantling them. Sometimes the band become those parameters, but that’s not the case here. These are Vitriol songs through and through, and while it would be easy enough to go through the litany of adjectives to describe what they accomplish--punishing this, crushing that, and a lot of different ways to say “it’s fast and heavy and a little weird”--Pain Will Define Their Death deserves better. Suffice to say that it is all those things. This is death metal without the “retro-fetishism,” a visceral and affecting piece of music that jars and shocks as often as it strikes awe and milks the adrenal gland. It’s not an easy record to put down; at three songs, it demands to be played multiple times in a row and inspires a craving for more by offering us just enough of the familiar to highlight the excitingly unfamiliar. Whether it’s truly ground-breaking is something its legacy will decide; for my money, it’s one of the best records of the year, and in tandem with the band’s obvious passion for the music and the thoughtful, no-bullshit conviction that powered these songs into existence, I think it’s ripe for discovery. -Brian L.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Metal LifestyleOwner Operator: Dakota Gochee Coming Soon:
|