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But if I ignore the warning
bells, what I’m left with is an album that’s simply and undeniably
excellent. These are some of the best death metal guitars you’ll hear
anywhere: technically lush, marvellously brutal, and occasionally lyrical
-- if you liked Metallica’s lull-then-crush patterns on ...And Justice
for All, you won’t believe the extremes to which Aeternus takes
the basic concept. The vocals are nothing special, but that’s par for
the course in death metal; the whole point of death metal is to make you
feel like you’ve just been hit in the face by a fifty-mile-an-hour
subzero gale, and Aeternus supplies that feeling by the scoopful, ladling
on occasional dips into drowsy-doomy Sabbath territory just for the hell
of it. And some of the lyrics are actually kind of interesting: “Burning
the Shroud,” for example, actually presents the case for darkness over
light in language you might expect to hear from Baudelaire or Huysmans:
“Free your consciousness/Accept the reality of darkness/it has never
been/a place of dread/knowledge and wisdom/is given to those who seek/achieve
the empowerment/of endless mysterious nights.” |
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