Omen ex Simulacra

In the midst of Metal being at the most artistically and philosophically-challenging it has ever been it is easy to forget sometimes that at the end of the day the musicians behind those genre niches are just as human and just as prone to competitiveness. In the 80's there was the race for Thrash bands to be the fastest; in the 90's Black Metal bands vied to outdo each other for evilness and lo-fi production and then of course in the late 90's Death Metal bands began tuning lower, introducing stupid pitch-shifted animal vocals and trying to be “more technical/br00tal than thou.” It would be nice to think warped, abyssal Death Metal would be exempt from childish combatativeness like this, but I fear that in trying to distinguish themselves from the small crowd of bands playing this style Ӕvangelist have gone too far. Some people have called the new Antediluvian album almost unlistenable, but at least on Logos everything seems driven by a unified theme. This album is a mess, and a long and obnoxious mess at that.

One of my main issues with this is that it feels like an album of two halves. The 12 and a half minute opener “Veils” starts off in a much more atmospheric fashion than most contemporaries like Mitochondrion or even Portal, to the point that this nearly has as much in common with the most confrontational Noise/Power Electronics artists like Whitehouse or Suttcliffe Jügend, and a real grimey early 90's Wax Trax! label roster tone to the drums. There are some of those typically disrhythmic riffs in there too, but it feels as though they are just another fragment in this sonic jumble- not given the pride of place they normally are on Metal records. I have no problem with that personally, and I wouldn't be averse to a whole album in this style, but it's unfortunate that this fairly groundbreaking approach isn't mirrored with similar unusualness thematically or aesthetically. If anything, Ӕvangelist are playing it a bit too safe here in that respect.

The album gets increasingly more Metal as the hour plus duration ticks along, first with blastbeats coming in on “Mirror Of Eden”, and then some tremelo-picked riffs on “Hell Synthesis.” The problem is though that the atmospheric noise elements sit like a blanket of static on this, muffling the riffs and strangling any memorability out of them. It is obnoxious to listen to, unnecessary and has no theme behind it- it seems driven only by the desire to take everything about their style and push to the nth degree, losing what made it enjoyable in the first place.

The album gets better in the second half, with the drum fills in the middle of “Prayer For Ascetic Misery” and the orthodox Death Metal groove and memorable riffs of “Relinquished Destiny” and “Seclusion” providing some standout moments. It just feels too much like a completely different album from how this started out. On the atmospheric half of the record they try too hard to beat their contemporaries, and on the generic straight-up Metal side they don't try hard enough. [4/10]

From WAR ON ALL FRONTS A.D. 2013 zine- www.facebook.com/waronallfronts