Manifesto

No, I haven’t forgotten these Frenchies, these sublime dementors who in the distant 1993 caused a crack in our reality much bigger than the one caused by all the dementors combined from the Harry Potter franchise… with their ravishing third instalment “Sublime Dementia”. Although this is the only major crack on the music plane they have caused so far, I kept looking into their camp and repertoire, both to check if anything too sublime hasn’t been gestated, and to generally see how they’ve been doing through the years. My not very frequent but still careful perusals have found that the band kept trying something new with each subsequent album, sometimes seriously tripping (the barely forgivable post-death/core charade “Fragments”) along the way, sometimes wisely sticking to tried-and-tested floridas… sorry, formulas (the retro tribute to the Florida sound “Planet Pandemonium”), sometimes remembering the good old thrash (“Frozen Moments…”) by letting it breathe in a nostalgic embrace with the common death metal denominator.

“Burial Ground” is another, not very typical showing the guys bringing some of the technical flair from their third coming, but serving it with a hefty sniff of doom, the staple fast-paced excursions pricking nervously the thick dark cloak, the final result standing for arguably the band’s finest effort since the “…Dementia”. The album reviewed here doesn’t go a step up execution-wise, opting instead for a more straight-forward classic death metal sound, the ripping opener “Todestrieb” early establishing the fast-paced domination which is later consolidated either by brief semi-technical sweeps (“Relentless Horror”), or by engaging more ambitious odysseys (“Erasing Reality”). The blast-beating extremities on “Preaching Spiritual Infirmity” may sound a bit over-the-top, but rest assured that the guys are well aware of the borders of the good taste, and nicely balance things with the atmospheric doom/death excursion “Invoking to Justify”. Later on operatic gimmicks (“Festering Pyre”), bigger melodic sensitivity (“Into the Greatest of Unknowns”), and more doom-laden meditations (“Infamy Be to You”) keep the element of surprise relatively high, but ultimately fail to swing the delivery towards truly lofty dimensions.

It’s a routine effort for the band more or less, not devoid of niceties but not spelling “greatness” anywhere along the way. Even if one doesn’t constantly hum the tunes from the “…Dementia” time and time again, he/she will hardly be left enraptured by this professionally-performed but pedestrian opus. But on the other hand, at this point in time, one can hardly expect the Loudblast team to do more than doing routinely their homework and go home… cause, if you think of it, one can do much worse than adding another competent manifesto to their discography. There’ll be none offended in the audience, and there’ll be hardly any genuinely astonished… sublime memories of sudden blasts of genius will remain just that, memories; and this is the reason why one should nourish those even more painstakingly than before… cause our unstable flippant reality may never give us another opportunity to savour them first-hand.