Fear not, right-thinking nervous people: when I say “diversity,” I don’t mean “every song sounds different.” (Is there anything worse than an album where every song sounds different?) No, Increased Damnation’s diversity lies rather in how immediately it distinguishes itself from the pack. Here’s what I mean: A large number of metal albums these days are recorded at a studio called the Abyss with a guy named Peter Tagtren at the controls. Tagtren is a great producer, but no producer can spread himself so thin that everything he records winds up sounding different, and so the Abyss has come to have a certain metal sound associated with its name. Guitars recorded there have a specific resonance to them; Tagtren’s been around for a few years, so his preferred cymbal sound is tight, crisp, and cut off, like a guy who was playing drums for a roomful of moshing Swedes might play. Increased Damnation was not recorded at the Abyss with Peter Tagtren. Increased Damnation sounds like it was recorded in a closet. The immediate difference between Aura Noir’s production aesthetic and everybody else’s jumps out at you from the first note of its first song, which is called “Mirage” (no, not the Meat Puppets song, though that would have been really, really cool) and whose engineering is credited in the handwritten sleeve notes to “Delillas-lookalike-silly-fuckhead man.” |