| As is the case more often with extreme metal albums than in other genres, great care has been taken to ensure that there is no filler here-- and how refreshing this is! In a world whose landfills swell with CDs that had two singles and and fifty minutes of padding, each song here seems to compete with the one before it, so that the album builds like a giant boulder rolling down a snow-covered hillside. Really, the only weak track is the corny “Manipulator of Souls,” although it’s a little distressing to hear how obviously the band feels that this song is in fact the album’s centerpiece. (They set off the song’s forgettable chorus by shriek-speaking it a capella: not a great idea when the lyric in question contains the phrase “raping your existence in darkness.”) Little matter; good artists are the worst judges of their own capabilities, and anyhow, “Manipulator of Souls” isn’t so bad. It’s just not as good as the rest of the record. The album’s real center lies in the two-song cycle that takes up the #3 and #4 slots: “Era of the Mercyless [sic],” which is subtitled “Roma: Part I,” and “As the Glorious Weep,” subtitled “Roma: Part II.” The huge, hugely distorted but remarkably harmonious guitar chords of these two songs deserve entire treatises to themselves: in the midst of double-kickdrum rollercoaster rhythms, one feels time freeze when the guitarist hangs an extra second or so on a particularly juicy minor-thirteenth. The main riff of “Part I,” unlike practically any other death metal riff you’ll hear this year, is actually catchy, which is so shocking in a death-metal context that it’s like saying the new Liza Minelli record has some pretty brutal murffmurffcore segments toward the end. Nevertheless, the riffs break free from the prison of death-metal bass-heavy growl on an average of twice per song, and the results are unabashedly pure headbanging music, as insistent and compelling it its own way as Metallica used to be before everything went to Hell. “I’m sick and tired/of feeling nostalgic,” bellows Kataklysm’s singer as the album’s lead-off track, “Il Diavolo in Me,” kicks off, the constant, simultaneously numbing and rejuvenating smash of the snare drum revealing why this peculiar strain of Canadian death metal is sometimes called “Northern hyperblast.” The production is meticulously done, with separation at a premium and no downtime at all. There’s a song called “Wounds” whose first-person narrator, in his growly death-metal voice, seems to be Jesus Christ, angrily decrying His position on the cross at the moment of His passion. When you get over how pissed-off the general tenor of Epic seems to be, the only emotion that could have motivated such a beautifully crafted record, whatever its thematic obsessions with violence and pain, is love. |
