Echoes of Battle

I really liked this album when I first heard it- I think most people who enjoy a bit of epicness and/or total Summoning worship would find it hard to resist its well produced, deliberately grand-as-fuck opening strains. But just as an impressive bit of steak goes off if you leave it in the kitchen and don't freeze it, so this album started smelling, then kinda rotting, with the end result being a very relieved Caspian deciding not to order the LP.

What I'm trying to get at with that terrible metaphor is that this album initially seems pretty fucken impressive and shit, but about two listens later you're sorta getting a bit bored. Here I am, maybe 10 or so listens on from that (and with a new Summoning to put it in proper context) and I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that this is actually quite a bad record, it's not even really all that good for background study/rainy surf times music, it's honestly just quite forgettable, if not aggressively boring. A gravy steak in scotch fillet packaging.

Anyway, so Echoes of Battle takes a lot from Summoning's Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame- the drum production, the synth sounds, those huge choirs, that sort of wide open, clearly differentiated mix where everything's super audible. They add a few of their own things- guitar solos here and there (dudes can clearly rip, no question about it) and overall a bit of an extra rock feel to the whole churning, mountains-of-New-Zealand sound. Pursuing such a sound is fine and good and I'd be lying if I said that I wouldn't be getting super moist right now if someone told me of a band with that sort of sound. But descriptions and actual music quality don't have a perfect correlation and here's good enough proof of that.

It tries sounding epic and you do get taken in on the first listen or two. But when the initial froth fades it's not so good a picture; those really badly autotuned vocals (just layer them up like Summoning dudes) that are everywhere- compare them to Farewell or Land of the Dead, and take note of just how uncreative and flat out boring those melody lines are. Compare the middling, totally unmemorable synth lines (in any song) to the delightful, incredibly immersive melodies of something like Ashen Cold or Khazad Dum, etc etc. Finding pan flute samples and playing them over a droning, sorta-there riff is again, something that would normally make me quite aroused, but here it's just really uninteresting.

I know that it's a bit unfair to be all "well the riffs just AREN'T THAT GOOD", etc, as that's a rather subjective thing, innit? But it's honestly the truth of the matter. Caladan Brood know how to program some drums, they know how to write a pretty mean guitar solo- certainly the last few minutes of Ashes of Dead Empire is pretty rad in that whole, big epic guitar bro solo thing that happens- but overall we're just looking at a pretty big deal of nothing here.