Bright Lights, Deep Shadows Melodic death metal is an oversaturated market with what can seem like only a handful of worthwhile acts. These would be your holy Gothenburg trinity of early In Flames, At the Gates, and Dark Tranquillity, along with their European brethren in Insomnium, Dissection, Amon Amarth, Children of Bodom, and Soilwork. Stateside, Arsis and The Black Dahlia Murder have held down the fort (and if you want to stretch the parameters of the genre to include Undying and Darkest Hour, well, the American melodeath scene probably wouldn’t argue. It’s bleak out here). These bands have all released excellent records and survived rough patches, with the exception of In Flames, who have fallen off the wagon spectacularly--a wagon they once set in motion--and Amon Amarth, whose borderline-supernatural consistency has eroded any and all conventional metrics of “good” and “bad.” They’ll be playing through Ragnarok if they have their way. Bright lights make deep shadows; beyond the glitz of Gothenburg, melodic death metal has more than its share of excellent, worthwhile bands hidden away in its darkest corners, sometimes within spitting distance of the mighty Sweden. The American melodeath metal scene, like its black metal scene, has struggled with a bad reputation despite a history of forward-thinking acts as interesting and innovative as anything out of Europe. If you read or have checked in on the American Metalcore Project before, you’ve heard similar sentiments out of me, because I naturally side with the underdogs. The Side Gallery is an extension of that same affinity, and while it won’t be as comprehensive as the AMP--I don’t have nearly the same depth of experience with melodeath as I do with metalcore--think of this as a limited-series spin-off, or better yet, a sister channel. Just like the American Metalcore Project, we respect the big names (hey, the title of this venture is a riff on that Dark Tranquillity album), but acknowledge that they sometimes overshadow a record that’s just as good for no concrete reason. Sometimes, it comes down to that old stick of right place and time. For example: 1. Uncanny - Splenium for Nyktophobia (2004)Listen to the record and look at the release year: a full two years prior to The Jester Race and the same year as Lunar Strain, In Flames’s countrymen in Uncanny had the idea to cram the same base of Swedish-style death metal with as much melody as it could hold, birthing Splenium for Nyktophobia into a musical climate that wasn’t quite on its wavelength. Maybe the problem was that Uncanny went the ostensibly safer route, weaving minor-key melodies into the record’s dark, compact thrash rather than foregrounding major-key shred the way In Flames would do so influentially for four-to-five records. Only the album’s collection of guitar solos approach In Flames’ band’s vibrant melodicism, but it’s the exception to the rule, which is to riff as hard as possible at all times. In any case, Uncanny had the lead on melodeath’s most important institution back when In Flames were still fumbling vocalists and smashing folk and metal in the hopes of innovation. I know we just said we’d respect the big names, but the difference in quality between demo-era In Flames and Uncanny is hilarious, and in a roundabout way, illuminates just how miraculously In Flames got it together to become one of the best-known bands in metal. In 1994, Uncanny were professionals with restraint and finesse, writing memorable hooks and densely-calculate rhythms in digestible, three-to-four minute packages that total up to some seriously jammable melodic death metal. They play fast and upbeat in the tradition of Carnage and Dismember and reproduce the threatening grandeur of Terminal Spirit Disease through a grimier lens; there’s simply more death than melo- here, and it’s performed exceptionally, without the burden of trends to hamper the delivery. Thematically, Splenium revolves around fear--when decoded, the ten-dollar words in the album’s title break down to mean something like “the brain-stem of fear,” if not “the root of fear.” Lyrically, most songs take the form of vague horror narratives that are sometimes unintentionally funny (“Elohim” reveals itself as an alien abduction story with this nugget of gold: “My memory went black / I dreamt unholy dreams / once inside the mothership / I woke up and screamed”; there’s also the breathtaking subtitle of “The Final Conflict”--I shit you not, it’s called “The Pornoflute Part II”), but generally, they serve to underscore the album’s tone of menace. Apart from Uncanny’s semi-safe approach, it was probably some confluence of the gathering wave of similarly-minded proto-melodeath bands around them and the record’s compactness that doomed them to obscurity. Its respectable length of thirty-eight minutes, three-to-four minute songs, and consistent tempo makes it a breeze of a listen, and therefore a slightly forgettable one, easy to overlook in favor of those records with longer runtimes and more variety to offer during this formative era. There’s always a place for a record that only wants to kick your ass, a criteria Splenium for Nyktophobia certainly meets, but it is also more nuanced than that. Like another record we’ll encounter, its density hides a progressive streak in the songwriting that could have flourished on future records and garnered the band the attention they deserved. But, that long-ago-missed opportunity being as it is, we’re still left with this excellent record, which comes out to breaking-even when all’s said and done. -Brian L.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Metal LifestyleOwner Operator: Dakota Gochee Coming Soon:
|