We Are Gathered Here Today

Glass Casket’s first full album, We Are Gathered Here Today, is a powerful mix of death and metalcore (or deathcore, if you will). Their sound resembles that of Cryptopsy, Between the Buried and Me, Cannibal Corpse, Beloved, Converge, and Meshuggah. The guitars are complex and fast, sometimes doing a death metal tremolo chord sequence, sometimes a metalcore break down, and sometimes an insane Cryptopsy-style jazz-metal tornado. This was exactly the kind of mix of genres I was looking for, gosh-dern I was impressed.

The Album’s first track, “Pencil Lead Syringe” puts you immediately into the Casket world. The maelstrom continues all the way until track 5 where we are introduced to an eerie world (probably equipped with fog machines) – actually it sounds kind of like the Halo background effects when you are fighting the flood – with deep-ars growling and muttering. That fades into one of my favorite tracks, “Chew Your Fingers”, with definite Cannibal Corpse influences and equipped with a good old metal solo. Their promotional track In Between the Sheets is also one of my favorites, it sounds more similar to Hate Eternal except for the middle where another nice solo makes an appearance and the vocalist show what he can do with his clean vocals for a line or two, which are very good if you like that sort of thing (I do).

The guitars of Glass Casket are something unnatural, while somewhat repetitive they still manage to keep the listener interested. Some adjectives for them would include grindy, heavy, gravel-mashed-in-your-face, a-thousand-razorblades-flying-every-which-way-cutting-the-hell-out-of-every-thing, and on occasion beautiful and floaty. The drums aren’t necessarily record breaking in speed but what they don’t have in that they make up in shear randomness and creativity. The old bongos certainly do sound like a guitar-like instrument and they fit in very nicely with the music, I wouldn’t have them other way. Fantastic. The vocals are so good, he reaches low growls and throaty screams, he also does his bit of spoken word and singing (as previously mentioned). The lyrics he writes are original and powerful, the last track, “A Gray A.M. You Will Never Get To See” is about the death of his sister, he goes from screaming the hell out of his throat, to talking to us, to calling out to the world.

I marked this down 3 points because of the repetition, which I barely mind, but still gets in the way at times.

This is a mind boggling debut from a soon to be behemoth (if you don’t mind the expression) in metal history. Cheers.