Dragonhammer - The X Experiment

#FOR FANS OF: Power Metal, Rhapsody, Timeless Miracle

Even though flowery Italian power metal tends to be scoffed at a lot by purveyors of more extreme music within metal, I actually kind of like it as a concept. Because it is referred to as "heavy" metal, some may be under the misconception that anything on the lighter spectrum of things within metal should be excluded due to the lack of the same grit or intensity metal is (apparently) SUPPOSED to have. However, I don't really have this preconception coming into music in general, in fact, I seek out the most delicate and beautiful sounding moments in music I can find most of the time. For this reason, I can listen to Rhapsody (of fire?), Balflare and Timeless Miracle among a few select others from time to time and they don't sound nearly as out of place in their poppy, saccharine splendor as they might for someone who primarily listens to black, death and heavier doom. It's also for this reason that my eventual problem with 'The X Experiment' isn't necessarily that it's too syrupy and flowery; no, my issue is actually that the album isn't quite flowery enough. The underlying structure of the album is well-crafted in its own right. The songwriting isn't anything revolutionary, but it makes sense, and that's probably a little more preferable for me when it comes to power metal. The guitars come out in a clean and clear tone and the bass is actually present, although it never comes into its own enough to be overtly recognized either way. The drums are a tad dry and clinical, but it never gets to the point where it really starts to annoy you. On the whole, this album is well put together; sure, there are a lot of references to common songwriting tropes of Italian power metal but, well, this is Italian power metal. What exactly were you expecting? This stuff is about refining and perfecting what's already there, not reinventing the wheel. The cliched nature of the album only becomes a hindrance to its quality when there's no speed and overblown energy to supplement the riffing, and Dragonhammer will only play something of a significantly faster tempo to either provide an enticing (and misleading) introduction, close out a song, or segue into a solo. The riffs frequently sound as if they're struggling to keep up with the drums and/or keyboards and often seem to have to resort to more simplistic riffing measures as a result. A good deal of the meat riffing in the verses is comprised of monotone tremolo with no extra dimensions to it. I'd like to say to say the melodically pleasing but sometimes trite and cliched guitar leads are just the result of an older guitarist comfortably playing below his skill level, but having not heard any of this band's previous albums, These songs don't make me very confident he has the chops to perform anything more intricately composed than 'The X Experiment' to begin with. The extensive focus on slower balladry and ominous, thorough intros by the keyboards into the choruses and solos makes the idea that this album is guitar-based come into question. When you stop making riffs the main feature of my metal, you're gonna start to run into some problems. Fortunately, the keyboards are handled well enough that Dragonhammer can get away with the guitars residing more in the shadows than a listener of this style might be accustomed to. They often provide much more to grasp at in terms of melodies with texture than the guitars do; just examine the beginning of "Escape" to see an example of this. The keyboards will often play the primary melody while the guitars become the rhythmic base. The reliance on the keyboards to carry the songs was a good decision to make, because the verses they craft are much more listenable and memorable than anything the guitars can put out. It's because of these keyboards that some of the choruses on 'The X Experiment' do get stuck in my head from time to time, although saying that they're the only thing making the album catchy would be giving not nearly enough credit to the vocalist. Over the time I've listened to this album, I've gone from thinking he has some good qualities to considering him outright awful to having some sort of weird fascination with his vocals to finally just considering him quirky and interesting but with a few really evident flaws. The natural rasp and vibrato that comes with his voice gives him a bit of character, but he's also really noticeably flat, especially when he goes into his higher register and lets out a wail that necessarily has to be at proper pitch to have its proper effect. Being consistently a half-step underneath the note he's trying to hit, a lot of Max Aguzzi's "big moments" on this album can fall flat as a result. The fact that I know they're supposed to be big moments is a result of good songwriting, but the choruses that get stuck in my head aren't always memorable for the right reasons. Sometimes the vocals stand out because his tone was significantly off, or perhaps it's because of his thick accent and odd lyricism. If we were being true to the pronunciation of the title in the actual song, this album would be titled 'The Sperimen Hex'. It's part of the reason Aguzzi has a somewhat adorable personality as a vocalist, but it also makes it much more difficult to take this album seriously. It's hard not to endlessly flip-flop when it comes to my enjoyment of this album. It's quite the infectious little bugger, but there's just not enough skill and personality present in the music to make it last and the honest enjoyment of the album can be somewhat deterred by how cheesy it is. If you can't get enough sappy ballads and galloping chugs in your life, you'll find 'The X Experiment' quite satisfying as it's a very professionally done album, but I can't bring myself to wholeheartedly recommend this to any group of people other than that. (RapeTheDead)

(My Kingdom Music - 2013)
Score: 50

https://www.facebook.com/dragonhammer

Lions of Tsavo - Traverser

#FOR FANS OF: Sludge/Stoner, early Mastodon, High on Fire

In all of my explorations of specific little sub-niches of metal and searches for hidden progenitors and influences, I can sometimes perhaps forget the impact bigger bands like Mastodon can have on the small underground pockets of metal. They took what was at that point a cult, underground idea (sludge metal) and through superb musicianship and complex, involved riffwork, they took away the bleak sparsity that some would consider essential to sludge metal itself. Though the sludge aesthetic kept its presence in the riffs up until about 'Blood Mountain', they demonstrated a completely new take on the genre. Although not a whole lot in metal nowadays really sounds like Mastodon, there sure are a fuckton of people who listen to them, and there are bound to be tons of odd bands popping up that pay direct homage to them and bands of their ilk. Hailing from Austin, Texas, Lions of Tsavo is a nice little representation of what would have happened had Mastodon decided not to change their sound at all after they put out 'Remission'. Emphasis is on grimy, somewhat uptempo sludge riffing with a southern bluesy bite that brings to mind maybe something along the lines of Down. Think High on Fire, but with a little less bravado. One would think music of this nature would tend to be some interloping genre-straddler, but the focus and similarity of everything going on in the album makes this quite a straightforward sludge affair and it won't frequently wander off on an acid-fueled walk into the woods the same way Mastodon does, especially on their later albums. For people who prefer the band's earlier releases, this will serve as a nice little treat. For those of you who embraced Mastodon's transition to sludge-influenced prog rock, you're probably going to be slightly less amused with this album. The bitter southern grime taints all of the riffs, which vary in speed but not much in texture. Cleaner guitar sections are fed to you at the rate scraps are thrown to a dog; infrequently and inconsistently. 'Traverser' is clearly meant to be a winding maze of genre-less riffs, but the prickly undertone that permeates all of the heavier riffs blurs them under one banner anyways. That's not to say this album is one dimensional--the last two tracks have some really nice, relaxed Isis-esque jams--but the rough edge of the tone mixed with the dirty southern rock melodies makes for a sound that can end up rendering many riffs unrecognizable and forgettable if you don't eat Alabama Thunderpussy for breakfast. Reviewing 'Traverser' as far as the individual instruments go is a relatively easy task, because one musical aspect of this album is the clear strength and one is the clear weakness. The drumming is easily the best thing about this record, with drum fills and transitions smoothly interjecting, easy enough to follow but clearly requiring a great deal of skill to execute. Brann Dailor is one of the most obvious contemporaries in this style (are you sick of the Mastodon comparisons yet? I know I am), although the drumming here is much less outlandish and much more restrained than that spastic maniac ever was. The clear weakness would have to be the vocals, a series of never-quite-melodic shouts and growls that lack any sort of definite punctuation or charisma the way bands like this really need to have. One thing that really gets the point of sludge nailed in is the bitter attitude, and the post-hardcore esque wailing in an underground sludge metal format doesn't get any sort of appropriate emotions across. The riffs are a competent base around which the two disparate features form, only really interesting when more laid-back and melodic. "Circituous" and "Sea of Crises" generate some very evocative post-sludge, but the sludgier tracks are too spastic and dismal to release the tension they build. It sounds too aesthetically similar to High on Fire and too structurally similar to Mastodon to come into its own. It's still a worthwhile listen if you're into that style, though. Though not quite as infectious or distinct as one would hope their music to be, Traverser is still well-performed and, ironically enough, sort of compelling when it decides to relax a little. If you're completely strung out on your copies of 'Remission' and 'Death is This Communion' and need something that fills that void with different riffs, or if you're one of those sludge fans who has a soft spot for Isis, this could be of interest to you. (RapeTheDead)

(Toxic Asset Records - 2013)
Score: 65

http://www.facebook.com/lionsoftsavo

Gigan - Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery

#FOR FANS OF: Techno Death, Gorguts, Mithras and Ulcerate

There appears to be a subtle, but still fairly noticeable recent change in the direction death metal's heading in. Instead of just making thrash metal heavier, meatier and more gruesome, new death metal bands take the more outlandish aspects of Morbid Angel and Autopsy, add a nice dose of Obscura-era Gorguts and streamline it into something very detailed and showy, but still twisted and ugly. Popularized by Ulcerate and Portal, Gigan has actually been playing this brand of abrasive, incomprehensible death metal for quite a while at this point. Back in 2008, 'The Order of the False Eye' was an incorrigible slab of filth that seemed unfortunately out-of-place on a label like Napalm Records. Fortunately, Willowtip is much more fitting to their style and they've refined and grown as a band in the five years since that album came out. 'Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery' is an endless blitz of frantic riffing, but there's still enough oddly captivating melodic guitar frills to give the album a bit of accessibility to almost any death metal fan. Is this the rebirth of Floridian death metal? One can certainly hear the cues taken from things such as 'Altars of Madness' in the brute, low-end death metal riffing, but that's only one face of the multidimensional fabric of the album. Mostly thrashing about in mid to high-note spastic dissonance with the suffocating, mostly linear structuring of Immolation and Gorguts, there are additional flashes of intricate consonance amidst the frantic riff blender to give you something that actually sort of makes sense before swallowing you up in a discordant riff frenzy again. Even in giving you that small piece of melody to grasp at, 'Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery' never loses its speed in the process as long as the guitars are playing. Even when they give you something even remotely pretty-sounding, it's just as detailed, twisted and alien as anything else in the music. As seems to be the staple for any extreme metal band attempting to be "atmospheric", there are a few sections where the guitars and drums stop playing and the keyboards dominate with simple, haunting verses. These infrequent moments actually serve as quite welcome breaks from the intense abrasion that surrounds them, and are placed in the music only for that purpose and never wander for too long to distract the listener from the main purpose: getting paralyzed, scrambled and suffocated in a cosmic vortex. The sense of professionalism that both Willowtip and years of evolving in artistry as well as musicianship has provided to Gigan is almost crucial to the expression of the themes on 'Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery'. Chaos is, in reality, a complex and precise process, and only with the capabilties and resources the band has accumulated can these sort of things properly be articulated. New drummer Nate Cotton is an absolute beast, constantly changing up what he's doing while still staying consistently manic and active. Constantly changing up the riffs like Gigan does on this album requires the drumwork to consistently keep up with the pacing of the riffs, and Cotton accomplishes this masterfully. He stands out really nicely on "Mother of Toads"; it's like Brann Dailor if he listened to way too much Marduk. His performance could have been buried under a raw production, but the crystal-clear modern sheen on this album captures every minuscule detail. That's very fortunate, because 'Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery' has a lot of riffs for you to sink your teeth into. Inevitably, Not every riff is going to be particularly accessible or intriguing. There are riffs you probably won't like very much because they do throw them at you at a rate so fast you can barely catch up to what's going on and nobody bats 1000 with this sort of approach. Nothing ever strays far from the chaotic, astral atmosphere, though, and that in itself is commendable. So this is technical death metal then? I guess. The band is technically proficient, they play death metal--but this won't sound like the technical death metal one might be used to hearing in this day and age, which tends to take heavy cues from modern brutal death metal and deathcore; the similar bands are too old-school on 'Multi-Dimensional Fractal Sorcery' and the music is way too jam-packed and dissonant and lacks the punishing groove or bludgeoning that death metal usually has almost as a byproduct of its nature. Gigan serve to remind us of how versatile death metal can be and how broad a palate of influences death metal bands can draw from these days. (RapeTheDead)

(Willowtip - 2013)
Score: 85

http://www.giganmusic.com/