The Sacred Seal

So, after Low Magic, speaking of bands going all out in pursuit of nerdstalgia…

I remember when I was ten years old, my best friend Andreas and I would break out a black cardboard box and rule book, set up the fold-out game board on the rug on his floor, and move the little resin figures with shields and swords around on the square grid, peeking through play hallways and creaking open imaginary dungeon doors, seeing with the roll of the dice whether goblins or minotaurs or wyrms lurked behind them, or whether there was treasure to be found. That was my first exposure to the world of tabletop role-playing games. Dungeons & Dragons. First edition rules.

Clearly Columbus, Ohio’s Grayhawk (named after, and name-dropping from the first track, one among the very first – if not THE first – 1e setting) has the same feeling of nostalgia for the classics. This ‘demo’, The Sacred Seal, which is really more to be considered a full-length concept album even if it was released as a cassette, is clearly meant to evoke the sense of wonder, possibility and trepidation of the very first people who broke open that black cardboard box and started rolling the dice for the first time, perhaps when they themselves were kids. This is a highly admirable pursuit.

And it succeeds! Partway, at least.

There’s a raw, rough-edged quality to this release – and that’s not just the production talking, but the instrumentation itself is gritty. The songs alternate between a gruff, dirty NWoBHM / speed-metal styling with a hardcore / crust-punk / crossover-thrash edge reminiscent of Motörhead, Savage or even Corrosion of Conformity (‘Dragic’s Deal’, ‘Test Your Metal’), or else go hard in for Candlemass- and Solstice-esque epic doom (‘Under the Witch Elm’, ‘The Tale to Come…’, the Conan-ish main riff on ‘Lyzantine’s Phylactery’). This is what you would certainly expect from a low-fantasy sword-and-sorcery themed band like this one.

Zac Szymusiak’s vocals, ranging from punk ‘barks’ to Lemmy-like growls, aren’t quite my cup of tea. I think music like this demands the capacity for something cleaner on occasion – something more like the intro, but sung, not spoken. The instrumentation from all three of this power trio, however, is excellent. Even if the drums are a bit high in the mix, with a tinny cymbal and snare tone that occasionally gets annoying, there’s no question but Jack Proctor knows exactly what he’s doing, pounding those out those bass lines like a maniac.

The only real problem with The Sacred Seal is that there’s just too much going on for a first release. Grayhawk have seemingly caught a severe case of the Visigoth / Eternal Champion syndrome, where they just make these sprawling 7, 8, 9-minute compositions spanning a number of different progressions that could easily be chopped into two or three separate songs each. Furthermore, these are interspersed with these little intro-outro bits that clock in around the 1-minute mark. Speaking personally, I kind of feel like you have to build a reputation before you go all-in for a concept-album project like this. I mean, Manilla Road didn’t come straight out of the gates with Atlantis Rising, Spiral Castle or Gates of Fire. Their early albums, even the epic ones – Crystal Logic, Open the Gates, Mystification – are all short and sweet, with short and sweet tracks. If any of those albums run over 45 minutes total, it’s got to be barely that. For Grayhawk to put out a ‘demo’ that clocks in at an hour, with songs that long, they’d better be really cocksure they can sustain our attention, and I’m not sure they quite earn that here.

Still, there’s a lot to admire about The Sacred Seal. Grayhawk’s rough-edged brand of nerdcore is one that I can appreciate just on a personal level. Evidently that first 1e campaign they were on was so epic that they had to transcribe it into an epic metal album 20 years after the fact, and you’ve got to admire the dedication and labour it takes to do that. These are the kind of guys you’ll find painting their character and monster minis and splurging on dice towers – the kind of guys you’d want to play D&D with, in other words. I am looking forward to hearing more from these buckeyes, that’s for sure.

14 / 20