Primal

Holocaust has always struck me as one of the most unusual and unique bands ever to be spawned from the metal scene. Going from relatively normal NWOBHM to progressive/thrash metal a la Voivod, and now back to NWOBHM, over the course of the band's impressive 40-year span (and counting!). As I've mentioned elsewhere, several NWOBHM bands later morphed into something else, most often in the late 80s/early 90s, but few went as far from the rockin' heavy metal style as Holocaust did, going full Voivod on their first EP after they reformed, and to then go all the way back to rockin' heavy metal again is rather puzzling. Of course, a lot of this can be explained, yet even so it's a pretty strange case and one that, even with all the facts, I can't quite wrap my head completely around.

The biggest and most obvious reason for this shift was frontman John Mortimer, who has basically been the only original member since the "reunion" in 1988. There was, apparently, one drummer from the NWOBHM days who also played in the prog era for awhile, but it's pretty clear that the primary driving force of the band has been Mortimer, since he decided to assume both lead guitar and lead vocal duties on their 1984 sophomore album, No Man's Land. So it was pretty unsurprising that the development of Mortimer's musical tastes and interests would be reflected in the stylistic direction of the band. And of course, neither the shift to prog or back away from prog happened overnight; the first transformation came after a 4-year hiatus, the second after 10 years without any new original material. Mortimer has simply had different ideas about what sort of music he wanted to play over the years, and that seems simple enough on the surface. What's more intriguing is the fact that almost every release during the prog era of the band was rather stylistically distinct, and also that many of these changes included not only stylistic shifts but also radical differences in lyrical themes and the tone driving the music's atmosphere. Let me go into a bit more detail on this.

1989's The Sound of Souls EP was pure Voivod worship, albeit very competent Voivod worship that still managed to develop its own musical ideas enough to keep it from sounding too derivative. 1992's Hypnosis of Birds was a huge departure from this, borrowing much more from prog rock than from progressive thrash metal; only a couple of songs have any thrash influence, and then they sound virtually nothing like Voivod. Mortimer switches from a raw, savage bark to a squeaky clean vocal performance. As one might guess, the tone shifts pretty drastically - even more drastically than the musical shift would suggest, I'd posit. I'm not entirely sure as to the impetus which drove Mortimer to reform in 1988 and come up with The Sound of Souls, but I have read about his motivations in switching to the sound on Hypnosis of Birds. Mortimer has said that he was in a very bad place in his life and then one morning, out of the blue, he heard birds singing and the main riff for the title track on Hypnosis just popped into his head, more or less. I assume that this revelation, or a closely related one, also resulted in him "finding god," or at least discovering a rekindling of his faith, as only one song on The Sound of Souls references Christianity, and no songs from the NWOBHM era do. In fact, one track on The Nightcomers is pretty explicitly anti-Christian. Anyway, it's this juxtaposition that I find most paradoxical - that "finding god" caused Mortimer to go from slightly above average NWOBHM to some of my favorite albums of all time.

The paradox for me is that, as with (I assume) the majority of metalheads, I'm an atheist as well as an anti-theist. If I were to go to my 17-year-old self that one of my absolute favorite bands would have a pretty strong Christian theme, I would have laughed in my face. Yet here it is, nonetheless. It never really gets to the point of being preachy, but God and Jesus are mentioned explicitly in all of their post-Sound of Souls prog albums. This is an annoyance to me, yet the music so far surpasses almost everything else I've ever heard that it doesn't make me enjoy it less to any appreciable extent. Holocaust are literally the only band where this is true for me. I like a few other mildly Christian bands, but whenever certain lyrics come up, I always cringe, and it always makes me enjoy the song than I would otherwise. Mortimer, has, somehow, created an exception to this rule. This is where the perceived paradox resonates most strongly with me.

Okay, so I've spent four paragraphs and still haven't described the music on Primal. That's coming soon, don't worry. The last thing I want to mention before that is something I reference in the title of this review. There's a pretty clear symmetry in the five prog Holocaust releases. Primal, the last, is by far most similar to the first, both having a very strong thrash influence and semi-harsh, raspy vocals. Hypnosis of Birds and The Courage to Be are the most melodic, with much more of a prog rock foundation and very little thrash influence. Covenant really is a pretty even combination of both. What's the significance to this? Well, it follows the greater symmetry of Mortimer's entire career - heavy metal, thrash, prog rock, thrash/prog rock, thrash, heavy metal. Of course this could be largely coincidental, but to me it seems almost like a narrative, moving up to a climax and then coming back down. Covenant, for me, is certainly the height of his inspiration, being my favorite album of all time, and it's also smack dab in the middle of his discography. So, to me, that is the center point, the height of his genius, and this begins to taper off in a nearly linear way if you go chronologically in either direction. I bring all of this up here because I hadn't really been able to formalize my thoughts on Mortimer and Holocaust's discography until recently, Primal being the last of the prog albums that I was able to fully absorb and digest. That having been finally said in what is admittedly a very long ramble, let's spend a little bit of time, at last, on Primal.

As I mentioned, it's a very thrashy album, Mortimer opting for the gruff bark delivery over the cleaner one on the three previous albums. As far as the musical quality is concerned, it certainly doesn't compare to Hypnosis and Covenant, but I like it a bit more than The Courage to Be, which means that it's an excellent album, but one that falls just short of brilliance as a whole. Some tracks are certainly brilliant - the first two, "Iron Will" and "Black Box," have been the most memorable to me, and clearly Mortimer thinks highly of "Iron Will," since it's the only prog-era song he plays live these days. There are hints of the band's more melodic side here and there; the end of "Black Box" has a clean passage with somewhat less raspy vocals from Mortimer, and a couple of songs, like "Fools {Bring On the Light)" and "Made Righteous." These don't really fully hearken back to their more melodic work, the mood being one more of peaceful finality than of deep introspection or self-conflict. Rather than on Covenant and Hypnosis, which often includes a hopeful melody and a more ominous one played simultaneously, here we tend to get more of an alternation, with long periods of pretty much pure rage and hatred occasionally relieved by passages of hope or peace. I feel this isn't quite as strong as the other method, as the ideas aren't in direct conflct and therefore aren't as complex or really as ambitious either, but that's kind of like saying being a millionaire isn't quite as good as being a multi-millionaire; both are in such utterly fantastic territory that it's really more of a quibble than anything.

I would say that this is probably their darkest album as a whole. While the EP was very aggressive and rage-filled, it stayed in that territory pretty much exclusively, which suggested more of a warlike atmosphere. Here, the rage sounds more bitter and desperate, and the softer counterpoint suggests, as I said, more of a kind of peaceful finality, like the wistful nostalgia of someone who knows things are coming to an end for them. I think this works very well in context, considering this is the last prog Holocaust album. It wouldn't surprise me if Mortimer himself was somewhat aware of this, and wrote the album as a reflection of his feeling of not having a lot of inspiration left in him, or something similar. When it comes down to it, the one single word I'd use to describe prog Holocaust as a whole would be "organic." The progression seems very natural, symmetrical but not perfectly so, a fairly messy and complicated progression, stumbling into something greater, something which transcends mere music, spending just enough time there to fully capitalize it and describe it, a brief vision into a greater world before stumbling back out again, never fully in control of it but also better for having seen it. Though I doubt Mortimer will ever be gripped by the unparalleled genius that struck him for the 10-15 years or so of prog Holocaust, the memory remains, both in him and within the music itself, and any who are fortunate enough to listen to its wisdom. Yes, Holocaust is a paradox for me, but then, life is kind of a paradox, isn't it? Wanting to live without knowing what we want to do, stumbling onward without knowing where we'll end up, valuing our existence only because of the knowledge of our own mortality. These albums will always stand as a testament of that, a true representation of who we are and what we do, and anyone who hears them will be more aware and more enlightened for it.