Incorrigible Bigotry

This review is going to be a bit chaotic due to the fact that this album is accompanied by several topics about which I am unable to keep quiet, every time I try to comment on "Incorrigible Bigotry" it is inevitable that I find myself with ramblings about aspects surrounding the band's image, I will try to focus the review as much as possible on the music but I can't promise that the content will be 100% about the music.

Melodic death metal has always been a kind of genre in discord, although there are great references of great acceptance by the general public as Dismember, we have many others (Dark Tranquility, Arch Enemy, Carcass from Hearthwork or At The Gates from Slaughter of the Soul) that have been more or less criticized for their contribution to the genre, to the point that even today there are still people who deny the quality of this musical style, among several reasons, for moving too far away from the original death metal sound for the sake of greater commerciality. Arghoslent has stood out in the scene for several reasons, but one of them has been that they have always been defended for being one of those bands that is able to make a raw and direct melodic death metal.

The main reason why Arghoslent has stood out in this environment is because of their riffs, it's obvious that Alexander Halac is a great riff writer but Arghoslent's compositions usually decay quite a bit in the more melodic segments, which, as much as it pains their fans, are no better than those of "Children of Bodom". It almost seems that the dynamics of all the songs on the album can be divided in the same way:

Step 1-Powerful and fast opening riff, occasionally accompanied by a short solo.
Step 2-Chorus and incredibly boring melodic segment.
Step 3-Change of dynamics towards the end that presents a couple of good riffs to finish the song.

I think the best song that describes this is the homonymous "Incorrigible Bigotry", the first minute of this long instrumental is simply incredible, we see the best side of Arghoslent, the quality of the riffs and how the sound of the guitars dances from the most extreme to the most melodic with a fluidity worthy of admiration, fuck if all the songs were like this we could talk about the best death metal band in history, unfortunately after that first minute everything turns off, everything that was built in the first part is decimated by a total inability to recreate that mix between aggressiveness and melodism, and everything related to the melodic arrangements falls off being not very charismatic.

Arghoslent transmits me insecurity, his music does it, as if he thinks he is better than he is, it's incredible how Arghoslent transmits the same as his followers, young white males who have the need to feel special and unique and for that they will resort to anything to be noticed, that's how Arghoslent's music feels, at least on this album, they pretend to make believe that they sound more raw and more real because they play a more Bolt Thrower riff driven style but since that doesn't make them stand out enough they need to draw attention to themselves by being racist.

Ah racism, you know what, I won't expand on this, I think it's impossible to deny that thoughts like racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia are as common as in the past but fortunately every day the awareness is greater and these lines of thought are less seen, however people will not stop having these mentalities from one day to another and many will take advantage of the victimization of whites to make propaganda in their favor. That's why every day I have more and more clear that when someone has so present in his personality or his work some trait like this, in this case racism, is because he uses it as a commercial motive, which works because racists tend to justify among themselves, and if it is not for commercial reasons and it is because they really believe that there are races inferior to others and see the need to make it evident in their work, it is because lyrically they have nothing better to contribute, which is sad because musically they hardly stand out.

Even with all my complaints it would be impossible to deny the quality of certain passages, "Flogging the Cargo" is undoubtedly the best example that they are able to make a melodic death metal based mostly on riffs and solos influenced by 70's hard rock, unfortunately this level is not maintained at all throughout the album and the unmemorable moments become countless. Maybe my expectations were too high because of their "choleric" fans who were not afraid to say that Arghoslent is the definitive melodic death metal band and that their riffs would make Bolt Thrower look weak next to them. Nothing could be further from the truth, once again the fan base full of insecure white teenagers have changed the reality to their advantage, of course they would love to have the best death metal coming from a racist band but they won't have that luck, Arghoslent's Incorrigible Bigotry is at best a boring album with one good song and about ten good riffs.

At the end of the day, you reap what you sow and if they are proud to have fooled with their weak musical style a group of people that I myself could convince that the earth is flat with a couple of talks, good for them. The only problem with enjoying a lie is that sooner or later it falls apart.

Arghoslent is a band that is praised by certain circles of the metal underground for amazing riffing that encompasses diverse melodies. That's basically their shtick, and, to be fair, that's usually a very good quality. From a songwriting perspective, Arghoslent's Incorrigible Bigotry is actually a pretty decent album. Whether or not the riffs are appealing is a vastly different debate than if they are well written. In this case, I think any musician would listen to this and say "hey, there's a lot of good melodies getting thrown around". It never plods over the same few ideas repetitively, and they do a pretty decent job building the melodies off one another. It's passable by every stretch of the imagine as a well written album.

Beyond that, this album nose dives into mediocrity and results in being vastly underwhelming. This is supposed to be melodeath, and the songs are clearly written with a hint of aggression, so where the fuck is the beef? Sorry to go on a bit of a tangent, but Miles Davis once talked about how a single note that is played during a live performance is very dependent on where that note is played, regardless of how it’s played. If I play a note facing the listener’s direction, that sounds different than if I faced the other direction of the room and play the same note. The lesson to take from him is that the environment that encompasses notes, whether real or simply an abstract soundscape, is as important as what is actually getting played, and is often overlooked by too many musicians. We have a short name for this these days- "mix" or "production". It is what often separates amazing bands from bland bands from horrendous bands. I've been to plenty of local deathcore shows where the trademark "0-0-0-0" riff is played on a Line 6 stack by a load of opening acts that, lo and behold, sound like trash in comparison to the pre-amped and freshly ripened sound coming out of the national deathcore act that uses a full Mesa Boogie stack. Both bands might use the same “0-0-0” riff, but if you don't have the right mix, you have the equivalent of a pizza with floppy crust. The ingredients might be all lined up and ready to go, but the overall structure makes it fall flat.

In the case of this record, the mix on this album is as stale as fucking cardboard. All the instruments muddle together with very little thought in how the layers of sound should work with each other. The kick drums and snare have no backbone. They’re audible, but they don’t blend well with the guitar mix to give any sort of pop to the melodies. The guitars have an incredible lack of distortion for the context of the genre, almost having a guitar tone reminiscent of Iron Maiden or some other nwobhm band. That's not an insult to nwobhm or Maiden, but this is death metal- that tone doesn't fit the mood. Put a fucking chainsaw distortion on the guitars, or maybe even rake up the distortion a bit, pre amp the mid-to-high ends and make the guitars sound a million times more massive. But the current state does not work.

Now, to be fair, the instrumental title track on this album is somewhat the exception to this rule, as it uses the mix to create a more black metal atmosphere almost reminiscent of early Dimmu Borgir. Like early Dimmu, the lack of distortion allows layers of melody to breathe really clearly, painting a very beautiful soundscape. This is especially the case when the guitar solo kicks in, and is heard howling above the harmonies of the guitars. It would be cool if the entire album was like this, but it would require a different, far less aggressive approach to songwriting.

And the vocals- I mean, I'm fine with monotone vocalists, but when everything else feels so stale, the last thing that is needed is even more layers of sterility. A lot more variation would be highly enjoyable here. Instead, we get the typical straightforward melodeath scream that fits somewhere between a low grunt and high pitched black metal scream. Again, it's not like I always mind this, and in some bands this kind of scream actually rips. But, in the context of this album, it just furthers the entire output into more and more blandness.

"But those riffs are so well written!" Yes, they are. Good on them for being exceptional songwriters. But, in the meantime, with the near-infinite amount extreme metal bands out there, I'd much prefer to listen to bands that have the quality riffs and couple it with a good vision on what the end product will sound like.

A long time ago, much of the anti-mainstream underground-hailing portion of the death metal fanbase practically had a weekly public flogging session for the post Slaughter of the Soul/Heartwork domain of melodic death metal much like it did with brutal and technical death metal. It was understandable why they would; these styles hearkened the end of a classic era marked by some of the most aggressive experimentation in metal to date to the point one could argue death metal was advancing in too many different directions at once faster than labels and even hardcore fans could keep up with. It's only in recent years thanks to the internet and file sharing that we've been able to piece together a better picture of that but we arguably are still struggling to do so with just how so much of it is incredibly hard to find.

One thing that frequently came up during these ruthless and sometimes quite degrading or unnecessarily vitriolic beatings of Necrophagist, In Flames, Disgorge, Decapitated, Devourment, and so on was that some of these bands weren't really death metal and it was applied primarily to melodeath bands. Truthfully, I'd agree; much of that genre at heart was essentially just the classic heavy/power/speed/thrash death metal musicians grew up enjoying given a new fresh coat of paint, some out of place harsh vocals, a few surface level nods to extremity such as the odd tremolo riff or a blast beat here and there, and then marketed to the gullible sheep as they' say back then and it was a fairly common line of thought.

Yet at the same time it wasn't hard to find those who would speak of a time when melodic death metal genuinely lived up to its namesake; when it united an almost exclusively Scandinavian segment of the great early 90's diversification's prog/tech component with melodies that predicted a lot of black metal as much as they made it clear you could work your favourite parts of Liege Lord and Cloven Hoof into Morbid Angel or Dismember inspired riff architecture without breaking the aesthetic unity of the genre. Unanimated was frequently mentioned, Eucharist too, occasionally early Dissection, Septic Flesh's first two now and then, The Chasm often, and so on.

There was one band mentioned among them however that made it clear that much of this vitriol and hate for "trendiness" was surface level at best.

Virginia's Arghoslent from what I remember started off as a decent death/thrash band on that first demo of theirs but by the time they had a debut album all of that had gone off of the window and just so conveniently they too were now playing happy, smiling face, fun-times-and-cheap-drinks heavy/power/speed metal that too only had highly tenuous links to any kind of genuine extremity. Of course, the racism was a big part of it - "they're *racialist* not RACIST you PC liberal hippie", "they're just singing about historical perspectives", and other such vapid excuses for the neanderthals. Yet when asked why Arghoslent were suddenly "acceptable" to like when they were basically closer conceptually to oft mocked Dark Tranquillity or Amon Amarth it was that they "had riffs, duuuuuude."

Which brings me to another problem. Even once you cut out the "Stormfront doofus fumbles his way through his English and history majors" lyricism, this band doesn't even have that. I went over this in my review for At The Gates' Slaughter of the Soul but for convenience's sake, I'll condense the main point. This band at heart is just a more aggressive than usual power metal band that wants to play death metal dress up but all the components actively clash together and work against everything they're trying to do. They want to have these goofy, semi bluesy, rollicking sections that wouldn't have even made the cutting room floor of a Brocas Helm or Running Wild album and even some painfully sappy big regal sounding chords or widdly doodle-shred segments but the gravelly vocals fail to mix well with any of that, constantly contradicting their overly sentimental, weirdly sad-sack melodies that make Rhapsody of Fire sound like Tyrant by comparison. What's even worse is that they try to make it "epic" by dragging it out into fairly lengthy songs frequently around the five minute mark with a few at least six minutes in length but then they run into the problem of a lot of weaker heavy/power/speed bands constrained by the problems of more conventionally circular rock/pop songwriting by having these already toothless riffs and nursery-rhyme pacifying melodies go on way longer than they have to. It gets painfully bad when they have those big sudden pauses where everyone stops what they're doing then POOF, here comes a new (groan) riff pop up and when they actually try to do say a tremolo section, it comes off as just awkwardly placed there for no real reason other than to remind you that they too have the same kind of stylistic indecisiveness as your average swedish melodeath act, only aimed at the what-do-you-mean-Der-Sturmer-and-M8L8TH-aren't-apolitical crowd.

The end result at best sounds like a comically indecisive Greek black metal band that got partially bullied by BattleRoar and Wrathblade fandoms into going the epic metal route but then had to listen to the whining of its NWN vinyl hoarding fanbase to sTaY TRuE tO tHE UndERGRouNd and then uh, decided they hated brown people after they remembered their favourite war metal albums wouldn't exist without not exactly pasty white South Americans. Sure the production nowhere near as clean as the type of garbage that was clogging up Century Media and Nuclear's Blast's rosteres at the time and they have scene clout with links to Grand Belial's Reeeeeeeeeee and Twisted Tower Dire but production that sounds like a half-processed demo can't hide a band that had simply jumped on the same fundamental trend but marketed towards a similar group of easily fooled twats. What's even lamer is the really, really tame performance on the kit - Matt Sylvester was incredible in Morbius and by 1998 with Sojourns Through the Septiac he had cemented his place as one of the most creative in the genre. Roughly... none of that really pops up here in a performance just a few steps removed from being a halfway competently programmed drum machine. It makes the album even more tedious to sit through beyond its "we're not sure what to do next so uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" repetition and lightweight Children of Bodom fan friendly guitar work when you know that at the very least one person here could at least distract from the mind numbing tedium here that rivals some of the worst prog metal and doesn't even vaguely hint at what he's capable of.

Just stick with anything The Chasm did and toss this in the same garbage dumpster as the Pantera and Three Inches of Blood albums.

[EDIT: January 7th, 2020: I feel the need to add a disclaimer here since as of the time of this addendum, discussion is swirling around the band again due to rumors of a new album. I wrote this review over seven years ago as of this writing, and since then I've grown a lot as a person. It should be clear in the text that I've always been at odds with the band's beliefs, lyrics, and themes, but I look back at my defense of these things as mere peripheries that can be easily excused simply because the riffs are awesome and cringe myself inside out. In [current year] I find it much harder to separate art from artist, though I do maintain that simply being a fan of things like extreme metal and cosmic horror pretty much require such an ability to some extent since most of the classics were created by vile people in these niches. In hindsight, this defense is weak, and I have no desire to defend such abhorrence against people who hate the art on principle. I do mourn the loss of innocence in the sense that I simply can't listen to this with a sense of complete disconnect the same way I used to do. However, I have no intention of deleting or rewriting this review because to do the former would be to try to whitewash my own shitty behavior, and to do the latter would honestly be pointless because I simply can't be bothered to do so right now and would also be disingenuous because I do think that on a purely musical level this is worth the score I gave it initially. I still believe that, on a fundamental level entirely divorced from the inescapably inexcusable lyrics and aesthetics, Arghoslent plays a particular style of metal that is unique and worth pursuing, and I find the criticism of the blend of traditional metal riffs with death metal being antithetical to one another to be ridiculous and (usually) approached in bad faith from people who never liked melodic death metal to begin with. This blend of brutality and catchy hooks is fantastic on paper. So I leave this review up in its original form with this Looney Tunes Disclaimer at the beginning in the hopes that somebody will read this and understand what I love about this on a purely musical level, and then go start their own band that does the same thing but keeps the abominable racism far the fuck away from it.]


*sigh*

I really, really hate the fact that I love this album. I feel like a shitty person every time I headbang or air guitar, especially when I sing along. For those who couldn't take a hint from a title as in-your-face as Incorrigible Bigotry or song titles like "Flogging the Cargo" or "Quelling the Simian Urge", Arghoslent is a very racially charged band. They identify as racialist, which is different to plain ol' racism in the same way that fucking your half sister is different to incest. You see, these poor misunderstood souls don't hate black people, they just believe that they're genetically inferior ape-men who should be seen as subhuman. See? That's so not the same thing, LEAVE POGROM A-LOW-HOOONE. And yes, I'm well aware of the hypocrisy involved here because I always preach that the lyrics/message of the music shouldn't be a huge deciding factor of your enjoyment. I see this all the time with religious/anti-religious themes. There are people who won't touch anything with a Christian bent, which means they'll miss out on some awesome stuff like Woe of Tyrants, Trouble, and Tortured Conscience. And then there are the Christians who won't get near anything satanic or just anti-theistic in general, which means they miss out of 70% of heavy metal. My view is that it shouldn't really matter, because music is music and if you can make a connection to it, then it only enhances what you would normally like anyway, and if you disagree with it then oh well, your choice but you could be missing out on something great.

But Arghoslent? Man this is a test of my resolve. Social issues always light a fire in my belly, and here we have a band that I think are legitimately very good that stands for everything I don't. Here I am supporting a band who not only writes songs like "Manacled Freightage" (not on this album, that one can be found on Hornets of the Pogrom), but also contributed to a compilation titled Smashing Rainbows, obviously supporting homophobia. How can I consider myself a fan of a band who, regardless of whether for their genuine beliefs or just because they like to stir up shit, holds views so extraordinarily extreme and opposite to my own? The frank answer is this; they are one of the only bands in this day and age to write riffs on par with Mercyful Fate in their heyday.

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I know, that's a ludicrous claim to make. Nobody can write riffs like Sherman and Denner. Nuns Have No Fun, Melissa, and Don't Break the Oath are some of the greatest metal albums in all of history, and one of the reasons for the timelessness of those early '80s masterpieces is because the riff writing was and to this day still is unparalleled. That main riff to "The Oath" is in my top two greatest riffs ever written. Now currently there seems to be a small resurgence of Fate's sound seemingly centered around Sweden, with bands like In Solitude, Portrait, and (to a lesser extent) RAM. Even with all of these bands attempting to recapture the magic of one of the greatest bands in the history of heavy metal, I still maintain that the band that comes the closest to reimagining those gorgeous riffs are a melodic death metal band from Virginia.

And right off the bat I make another confusing statement. Yes, in the most literal sense, Arghoslent play melodic death metal. There is a difference between melodeath (which is essentially crunchy Iron Maiden songs with growls on top (see: In Flames, At the Gates)) and death metal that is melodic (which is what it sounds like, death metal with melodious riffing (see: Vehemence)), and Arghoslent fall into the latter category. Incorrigible Bigotry consists almost entirely of classic metal riffs put in the context of a death metal song. For a good example, take a look at the opener, "Flogging the Cargo". That verse riff couldn't be less death metal if it was played by Rainbow Bright and the Sugargina Brigade, but it's backed by a frantic blastbeat and layered underneath the hellish roar of the vocalist. Essentially each and every note the guitars rip forth hearkens back to the mindset of bands raised on Judas Priest and Mercyful Fate, and it really helps set the band apart (in addition to the obvious reasons). Honestly, I find it hard to deny the quality of the riff writing within the album. Originally I was just going to list a few examples, but I'm really struggling to do so. Literally every song barring maybe "Heirs to Perdition" is filled to the brim with top notch heavy metal riffs. My personal favorites are probably the outro to "Quelling the Simian Urge" and the bridges to "Archaic Invincibility" and "The Purging Fires of War", with the lattermost song probably being the best on display. The overall performance across the board comes off as rather sloppy at times as well, but it never works to the band's detriment for the same reason The Lord Weird Slough Feg's Twilight of the Idols is so enjoyable. In fact Slough Feg is another good point of comparison for the composition as a whole. Chaotic solos aside, the more midpaced sections (particularly "Archaic Invincibility") really bring to mind bands like Slough Feg and Brocas Helm.

The classic metal bent also gives the album an air of levity. Despite the waves of vitriolic bile that the band belches forth with the lyrics, I can't help but find them to be rather sing-songy. I know I've been quoting sections of lyrics an awful lot in my reviews lately, but again I just have to illustrate what makes this album so conflicting to me. I'm going to assume (hope) you aren't a bigoted dipshit, so try to imagine this stanza:

Burying swords into emaciated ribs
Tired naked souls could no longer walk
Exotic filthy mongrel dogs
Fettered to failure by a flawed genome

Imagine that presented in a way that was simply irresistible to growl along with. That morally confuses me as an obnoxious punkass who can't help but sing along and mimic instruments whenever listening to something vaguely resembling music. Arghoslent is just damn good at making their music catchy, and I almost hate them for that.

That said, I'm not in love with everything about this album, it does indeed carry a few noticeable flaws. The most obvious problem is presented precisely three seconds into the first song, and that is that the lead tone is obnoxiously bad. It carries an almost visible buzz that ends up being very distracting whenever a lead line is playing, it's like dropping a beehive on a synthesizer. The saddest part is that it isn't even all that different from the rest of the album. Considering 90% of these riffs were more inspired by Hank Sherman than Bob Rusay, the band doesn't really aim for crunch. Again, this makes the album's overall feel and sound quite distinguishable from most bands of their ilk. Instead of a thick, crunchy, and beefy assault, the guitars are instead a very heavy kind of fuzz. I'd call it "steel wool" if it wasn't so soft. Yeah, the tone is about as sharp and heavy as a beach ball, and it does take away from what the band was trying to do. The percussion also leaves a bit to be desired as well, as apart from maybe two filling segments in "Quelling the Simian Urge" and "Heirs to Perdition", he tends to alternate between three different beats and rarely changes it up. Usually this wouldn't bother me too much, but when the guitars are so creative, I'd like to see the rest of the band step it up as well. And if I'm being extra nitpicky, the tracklist could be tweaked a bit as well. The first three songs are instantly recognizable with tons of standout parts between them, and the following four, while all very good, tend to blur into one bigger whole. They all contain excellent parts that I'll hum and air guitar when I think nobody is looking, but I sometimes have trouble remembering precisely which song they came from. Plus the album really could have benefit from ending on "The Purging Fires of War". That song is just so damn huge and imposing, with that long bridge and monstrous buildup, if it were followed by any track other than "Quelling the Simian Urge", I'd probably quickly lose interest and go listen to the previous song again. It's a great closer and I wish the band would have realized that as well.

All told, it's hard to describe at length what to expect with Incorrigible Bigotry because "classic metal riffs in a death metal context" pretty much sums up the whole experience. I think it's incredibly well done and well paced and on the whole it's a very fun experience, despite the subject matter. I don't want to play the "Open Minded" card to justify why I like this album so much, but the beliefs are a huge part of what makes this band, so it can definitely be hard to get past. If you can though, it's chock full of excellent Mercyful Fate styled riffs and unstoppably catchy songs.


Originally written for http://lairofthebastard.blogspot.com/

I didn't want to review this again. I just wanted to lock it away forever in the vaults of time as a Mistake on my part, a tragically misguided opinion that I later found to be wrong. But so many people insisted that I go back and change my old review, which I left up merely to show what happens when one prematurely reviews an album, that I just had to give in. So many people were apparently so confused at the discrepancy between my ratings for this album and for Arghoslent's next pile of dog droppings, Hornets of the Pogrom, that I am forced to pander to the masses and, well, review Incorrigible Bigotry again. And yup, it's just as boring as I thought it was the last time I heard it! Excited? I bet you are.

Arghoslent is basically a really boring band at heart. Their music has no imagination, is short enough to be quickly forgotten and the only thing it really has going for it, is the riffs. Just riffs. Distilled of any songwriting power, any kind of emotional appeal, anything that separates us from machines making music...just riffs. That might sound good at first...wait, no it doesn't, are you fucking kidding me? I have never been quite this apathetic about music. It is technically all there, but where's the engaging factor that's supposed to draw me in? This music has no fire to it. It is a huge cobble of clickety-click riffing and dry melodies that sound as if they were produced by a machine. It is literally the best possible way I can think of to describe to someone the difference between inspired music and music that was so obviously just made to get a quick album out of the way so the band could go back to polishing their Klan hoods, or maybe throwing darts at pictures of Morgan Freeman and Malcolm X, or whatever it is this supposedly 'racist' band does in their free time.

Yeah, that racism thing is really something, isn't it? For a band that got so much infamy for writing such supposedly racist lyrics...these lyrics really aren't that bad. Yes, they often show a slight slant towards less-than-pure intentions aimed at black people, but really? Is this really all you have? I guess this is supposed to be 'intelligent' or something, but really it's just boring. They recite a bunch of historical anecdotes, throwing in some lines here and there about how black people are mongrels, or something, and overall it's just so goddamned bland. How can you even do that? How can you make racism sound bland? Well, they did - certainly some of the more pedestrian, tame lyrics I've read that concern the condemnation of another race of people based on a factor which they cannot actually control. What a load of suck. I've had more contempt for high school teachers.

The music is just as inconceivably bland. Picture The Chasm or Manilla Road except with everything mysterious, atmospheric and interesting removed. The riffs chug and gallop away without kicking up even one needle of a pulse. The rhythms are goofy and groovy and really not threatening at all. The intention here was probably to sound like classic heavy metal, and if so, they botched it up, because it just lacks any kind of punch. The vocals are growly without any distinction to them - not bad, not great, just kind of there. The melodies are classic-metal influenced, but that isn't enough; it's like saying that just because Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had Harrison Ford in the jungle with European bad guys that it was still a good movie. Which isn't true! The band just kind of throws these midget-sized melodies in the middle of the riffs to...make sure their music doesn't get monotonous? But it is, so the effect is nil. You need to emphasize things, you need to have some direction to your music, you need to use subtlety and atmosphere to enhance the music. Arghoslent does none of these things; their music is as insignificant and transparent as a family of ghosts living in a glass house. Everything is so small. Nothing leaps out at me, nothing demands my attention.

Incorrigible Bigotry...for an album called that, this is a really, well, corrigible album. It isn't that bigoted, it isn't exciting and it certainly isn't anything resembling good music. Some of the riffs would be good if the songwriting wasn't such a godforsaken mess of banality, and the melodies might be good if the band actually used them for something other than bridges between the clicky riffing, but it never is. Who actually considers this entertainment? People who don't even know what death metal is? Whatever. This is a load of starch-white vanilla nothing that I am glad to say I have grown out of. Case in point, readers: Just because a band has riffs and is metal doesn't make it good. This is a sack of shit, and I am done now. Over and out.

Arghoslent isn't the first metal band to choose to promote, or ostensibly embody, deplorable principles as part of their image; but they do seem to relish the consequential infamy to an unusual degree. In the case of "Incorrigible Bigotry", buried beneath the controversial subject matter, the music is quite entertaining.

The rhythm guitar is played with a very distinctive style. There's very little use of palm muted single note lines; instead, the rhythm melodies are comprised of rapidly moving chords slurred together. (Here I use the term "slur" in the musical sense, though the band certainly use plenty of the racial variety as well.) The riffs crafted in this manner are an absolute delight -- melodic and complex with a relentless continuity, rather than the more typical staccato chugging utilized in the genre.

The drumming and lead guitar are capably performed, and the vocals are well executed with a crisp sense of timing and an aggressive low growl that suits the music very well. But it's the riffing that sets Arghoslent apart from their peers; every song features several stirring, memorable riffs.

"Incorrigible Bigotry" is aptly titled, but thankfully sonic bliss envelops the ideological ignorance.

The album starts off very strikingly with a fast riff and as soon as the riff is played through the first time, the lead guitar kicks in with a melodic yet fast solo. That "striking riffs and great, melodic solos" fits the album well, but doesn't give a reader a proper picture about the album. So, the riffs are striking, but in what way? In many ways actually, for example the riff that starts off the record smacks the listener fully to the ground with sheer brute force, but the riff in 2:43 on The Purging Fires of War is just so magnificent in it's epicness that even Quorthon of Bathory fame would be jealous of it. Most of Arghoslent's riffs are so melodic that one could talk about actual melodic death metal and by that I don't mean Gothenburg-styled wannabe death metal but actual melodic death metal. The solos are mostly very NWOBHMish in their style although death metallic parts can be found too.

One of the most notable aspects in Arghoslent's music is their lyrics. They describe events of history but Incorrigible Bigotry's lyrics focus on, as one may or may not decipher from the album title, the colonial times when white europeans used to enslave black africans. The lyrics aren't in any way politically correct. The word nigger gets thrown around without shame and the description "exotic filthy mongrel dogs" doesn't sound very flattering. Zach belches out the lyrics convincingly, although not in a very unique way. The vocals do fit the music very well, so there isn't anything wrong in this department. The lyrics are written in quite a cumbersome form but the band has somehow managed to arrange the lyrics into the music though at times the strange vocal lines do annoy you if you listen carefully.

All the songs are efficient pieces of art though some of them stick to your head better than the others. Especially The Purging Fires of War, for that epic riff mentioned in the first paragraph, Flogging The Cargo with its flashiness and striking capability and the album's title track which is an eight minute-long instrumental. The song is filled with clever riffs and the solos in the end are probably the best on the whole album and make an excellent listen. All in all, I'd recommend this to all fans of metal since this album has many various and quite different things going for it.