The Mirroring Shadow

What do you get when you combine Christian Alvestam, relentless death metal, Sweden and a supergroup to wrap it all in a bow? Miseration.

On their previous effort, Your Demons - Their Angels, Miseration went for a typical melo-death sound. While nothing amazing, it was a good album (pretty forgettable, though) and it had the typical Alvestam sound to it. However, on their sophomore release, Miseration abandon it all and go for pure assaulting death fucking metal. Nothing new here, though. There's some underlying ambient keyboards, but other than that, it's just your run-of-the-mill death metal. Crazy fast, tempo changing madness... for about 35 minutes.

The album kicks off with Dreamdecipher, a 2:13 barrage of carnage. While it is good, it is most definitely not the strongest track on here. If you can't handle it, you better hit pause, delete your entire music collection and jump out of a window. Hell, you might jump out of a window because of how badass this album is. Anyway, this auditory entropy continues for the next two songs. From headbanging riffs to blazing tremolo picking, you get your filling of death metal for sure. But wait! There's more! Remember when breakdowns weren't stupidly commercialized by one-hit-wonder metalcore bands for hipsters and scenesters to slam dance to? I sure do. If you're a pussy about circular drumming with chugging riffs, you might want to skip this album. That's not to say it's a core album (it isn't by any measure) but there are quite a few breakdowns - death metal breakdowns mind you - and any serious elitist will find themselves in a fit of rage. In fact, I regret calling it a breakdown. It's more like really heavy fucking riffs. Yeah, that's better.

However, the sheer brutality isn't illuminated until the title track. Sheer, chugging death metal insanity. Sure, there's nothing surprising. Nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, there is even no tempo changes. It's a 4:56 chug-fest (before metalcore commercialized chugging, we would call this a crushing riff) of unforgettable in-your-faceness. The riff is a fucking behemoth and is only amplified by the perfect growls of Christian fucking Alvestam. I cannot tell you how many times I have put this track on repeat.

After the monstrous title track is over, it's back to the same insanity of the first 3 songs... except not as good. Yeah, A Trail Blazed Through Time and Dimorphic kick ass, but they are not on the same level as the first few songs. Luckily, Sulphury Sun saves the day and begins the crusade of two powerful songs, leading up to the final, explosive bang to finish it all off ("Theca"). Which leads me to my next point: Theca is fucking awesome. It follows the same structure of every other song: brutal, intense and crushing. However, it's the chorus and the atmosphere that really catches me. Every time I hear Christian bark, "Invisible gateways open up the ground" I want to drop concrete slabs on puppies. This and his otherworldly, boundless "The mirroring shadow!" on the title track are probably the catchiest and most brutal things I have ever heard by him, if not in the entire universe of death metal.

If the battering-ram, speed of light musicianship didn't bash your skull into an oblivion, the production (hopefully) will. It's heavy as fuck. The bass is powerful (but not dominating) and the guitars are crystal clear. Christian also sounds his best. However, a note to all the tr00 kvlt metal elitists: as the reviewer before me said, if you're xenophobic about death metal that doesn't sound like it was recorded in a fucking basement and it pisses you off to no end to the point where the album is intolerable, don't bother downloading. It's not overproduced, but it is very clear. Nothing fuzzy and at 320kbps, you've got a monster if you have good headphones.

Christian never seems to disappoint. When you combine him and a group of SUPERB musicians, you get Miseration. More specifically, add in magnum opus musicianship and you get The Mirroring Shadow. This is truly Christian's best work (yes - better than Holographic Universe!) and completely smokes his debut album with The Few Against Many (which really wasn't that good - his growls are much better than his deep gutturals). Cheers to his next project, Solution .45!


All in all, Miseration put out an album that I don't think they'll ever be able to top. Sure, there are no clean vocals and you really have to listen to TMS a few times to truly grab the essence of it all (as well as find the catchiness buried by the brutality) but when you do... you won't be disappointed.

All hail Miseration!