Behind the Shadows Lie Madness

With such albums as "Behind The Shadows Lie Madness" it's hard to refrain from not emphasizing how awesome music is on it. I can't see any other possibility! In any case, it really rarely happens that the inspirer is able to jump over the master, and so much so! "Behind The Shadows..." proves that it's possible. Mithras has previously presented a cool alternative, where Morbid Angel could go after "Gateways...", while this cd is an even greater turn towards cosmic death metal (even better than on "Worlds..."), and at the same time emphatic show which band is in my opinion higher.

Now about the content of this cd. "Behind The Shadows..." is a sequel to "Worlds Beyond The Veil", so it shares many of the same advantages and hits in similar areas, except that the accents were differently placed on it. In practice...there is no copying of themself or cripples from the Morbid Angel. This album is a true mastery of cosmic and extreme death metal, perfectly complemented with atmospheric ambient ("When The Light Fades Away", "The Journey And The Forsaken", "The Beacon Beckons"), and above all, with a perfectly tailored death metal (in total... any "proper" song). It's enough to listen to what Macey used to do here on both instruments, actually he took Mithras' music into a completely different (better) dimension and at the same time drifted far beyond to any possible limits!

So that should be enough to show how great and wonderful "Behind The Shadows..." is. At the end I mention the song "Thrown Upon The Waves", for me one of the best and most extreme songs ever made. And it is worth bearing in mind that these are not all the attractions of "Behind The Shadows Lie Madness"...

Originally on: https://subiektywnymetal.blogspot.com/2020/06/mithras-behind-shadows-lie-madness-2007.html

Frankly, all three albums from the UK’s Mithras are great, but for me, this one reigns supreme for one main reason – production. “Blasphemy,” you say! How can production determine which album is best in death metal? Well, Mithras plays a unique kind of death metal that, in my opinion, is heavily reliant on good production. Behind The Shadows Lie Madness is the only one of their albums to really have the solid production that they need.

What exactly does Mithras do that makes them so unique? Well, Mithras create a sound that is drenched in what sounds like a ton of delay (and possibly reverb) effects. Literally, a ton! There is just an obscene amount of it here! Some might call such a method unprofessional and hiding behind effects, but in reality, Mithras use this technique to create an astral, extraterrestrial sound that is rather unique in the death metal scene. The album cover really does an excellent job of summing up what images the music here conjures up in the minds of the listener.

From the opening piece, ‘The Journey And The Forsaken,’ Mithras heavily emphasize the spacey atmosphere with ambiance. Once it leads into the first real song, ‘To Fall From The Heavens,’ we get to hear the true essence of Mithras. Based on what I’ve said so far, you might expect some slow style of death metal behind a ton of delay. Well, that is certainly not the case! Mithras play fast, brutal death metal with a pretty sick guitar tone. The vocals are a very interesting style of articulate harsh vocals. After the first pounding section of the song, Mithras gets to the first solo of the album, and you get to hear the effects in full force, absolutely soaking the solo in them. It really creates an epic otherworldly atmosphere! Lastly, the counterpoint between the riff and the lead guitar melody towards the end of the song is really fun to listen to, especially once the vocals join back in.

‘Under The Three Spheres’ is one of the most accessible tracks here, mainly due to its lack of blastbeats, but the slowly played lead melody here is just too awesome not to mention, especially when it leads into the solo. This sound beautiful to say the least! All that this keeps doing, though, is emphasizing why Mithras needs good production to really sound at their best. The production really gives new life the the guitars, both lead and rhythm, relative to their other albums, and that puts this album on a whole different level of greatness.

The riffs here are very subtle, often taking a back seat to the lead guitar melodies, but at the same time, the play a very important role in providing underlying melodies to counter the leads. In a sense, the riffs focus more on synchronizing with the percussion instead of with the leads, which leads to them having a sometimes very rhythmic groove to them, especially when a lead is also being played. I often notice that the change in note during a riff sometimes lines up with snare hits (the first riff on ‘Behind The Shadows’ is a good example of this). Still, the riffs here are also heavy in their own right. In fact, they’re very heavy! ‘Behind The Shadows’ is actually a very good example of this, with a vast array of different riffs, all serving the same purpose and doing their job dutifully.

What we have here is an album defined by guitars. Both the astral lead guitars and the driving rhythm guitars completely shape this album. The leads here are some of the most odd, yet also most soothing, in all of death metal. These leads are the most important feature in creating the atmosphere that Mithras is attempting to achieve here. But at the same same time, the riffs here also keep this album unrelentingly heavy, making sure that this is first and foremost, a death metal album and not some melodeath crap that does nothing but focus on Maiden-esque leads. And the vocals are just the icing on the cake, with their deep, articulate rasp fitting perfectly with everything else. Simply put, Mithras is a band that every death metal fan needs to check out. This album is probably the most accessible due to its production, but all three are equally good and worth a listen.

Written for http://thenumberoftheblog.com/

Mithras have steadily evolved into one of England's best death metal acts, and this 3rd album is their most promising to date. It picks up where Worlds Beyond the Veil left off, brutal and quickening death akin to Morbid Angel, yet tempered in progressive structures, tasteful synthesizers and a cosmic/occult/metaphysical theme which gets spacey enough to leave this influence well behind in Florida.

The synth driven instrumental "The Journey and the Forsaken" immediately casts the mood to this piece, its simple tones elevate the senses to an astral space where surreal and alien forms menace and astound (sort of like the cover of the album.) Following this is "To Fall from the Heavens", which highlights one of this band's strengths: their ability to merge prog metal guitar riffing with blast beats and create a brutal hypnosis. In addition to the expected grunting vocals, they add some beefy cleans to create a fragmenting, explosive effect. "Under the Three Spheres" is blistering and beautiful, Sam Bean's brutal throat anchoring a frenetic and calculated balance of hyper melodies and thrusting percussion. The majority of the album is astounding, but if I had to pick a few standout tracks I really enjoyed the glory of "Behind the Shadows", the choppy and expressive "Thrown Upon the Waves", and the neck stamping "Awaken Man and Stone" with its winding rhythms. There are also some additional. synth pieces like "Into the Unknown", "The Beacon Beckons" and the excellent "When the Light Fades Away" which round out the experience. The lyrics aren't perfect, but adequately capture the haunting, longing cosmic themes surrounding the songs, rooted in Lovecraft and various mythologies.

Needless to say the album sounds fantastic, the band makes excellent use of their synth tones and guitar effects to dazzle the listener amidst the pummelling of the drums and grinding rhythm guitars. The vocals are blunt and effective and it's the type of album you surely want ot sit down and listen through in its entirety. I highly recommend this title when you're reading some sci fiction or engaging in an online game like EVE Online or something where the vastness of space occupies much of your time in between interactions.

This is a killer release and Mithras are one of the most promising death metal outfits from the Empire.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Like “Worlds…” before it, “…Shadows’…” instrumental overture starts at the exact place where the previous album ended, but for this, the band’s third full effort, lead composer Leon Macey—perhaps at the spur of some of his more noisy critics—significantly shortens the duration of “…Shadows’…” introductory piece to a meager two minutes and four seconds.


Since the single, glaring compositional flaw from “Worlds…” was its fragmented and overlong introductory track, this change seems like it should be an improvement of some sort as far as the immediate impact of the first “real” track is concerned, yet, when the listener is launched so abruptly (and at this point, predictably) into “To Fall From The Heavens,” it feels as if the band has shot off prematurely, and in an ironic twist on its own name, “…Heavens” comes crashing down in disappointing fashion.


The loose screw at fault here is the unintentional comedy that explodes in front of the listener’s face as he/she attempts to reconcile the song’s musical content to the events that it is trying to portray; apparently, no one outside of the band thought it was a bit odd that, in a song about a mystical being emerging in a strange, ruined world, ruled by darkness and chaos, the first two riffs—around which the bulk of the song is built—sound like they are trying to incite the audience into an Irish jig. Then come the clean vocals (of all things!), whose court jester style seems totally out of place in the context of the rest of the album and only serves to make this track the biggest, most embarrassing goofball in the Mithras discography to date.


Mercifully, “…Heavens” does make up for these gaffs towards the end of its running time when it drops the Riverdance riffs and awkward, Garm-imitation to drift away into a brilliant, descending/ascending melody. Sadly, that closing portion of “To Fall from the Heavens” is one of maybe three or four other legitimately interesting sections that occur on the entire album (other standouts being the entirety of “Where the Sun Never Leaves,” from the solo section forward in “Awaken the Kings,” and the pinch-harmonic theme from “Behind the Shadows”), as for the most part, "...Shadows..."feels like it has lost all of the vision and imagination that made the band’s previous album such a transcendent listening experience.


The main culprit here is songwriting, both in regards to the song’s individual parts and to their overarching structure. A big part of what made “Worlds…” so successful was its ability to achieve a fluidity of movement from beginning to end, within each of the songs, and from each song to the next. Much of this finesse can be traced to the strong integration of guitar solos and ambient segues, both of which helped to give “Worlds…” a very natural flow of emotion and energy. Listening to “…Shadows…,” it feels as if the band has completely lost its sense of pacing; virtually all of the guitar solos lack direction (and more importantly, purpose), making them feel more ornamental than organic, while the ambient sections seem well-written when taken out of their context, only to appear jarring and tacked-on when encountered naturally within the course of the album.


Regrettably, it is not just the guitar solos and ambient interludes that suffer from poor songwriting; it is also the guitar riffs and drum rhythms. On previous albums, these two attributes were key contributors to the band’s success, but for “…Shadows..,” the riffs and rhythms reveal themselves as deadly conspirators responsible for much of the music’s downfall. Aside from the goofy jig that opens the album, the vast majority of guitar riffs on “…Shadows…” feel like leftovers that weren’t good enough to make it onto “Worlds…” and were thusly zipped up into plastic wrappers, thrown into storage for a little while, and reopened whenever it came time to write the new album.


Unfortunately, knowing the creative personalities of Macey and Cross, this is likely not the case, as a great deal of time and effort seems to have been sacrificed during the creation of “…Shadows…”; the problem, then, must be that the band has dug themselves into the same creative rut that wears down most metal bands, i.e., the curse of following up a masterful album number two with an album number three that is on-par with—or less likely, superior to—its predecessors.


“Hell Awaits,” “Pleasure to Kill,” “Darkness Descends,” “Unquestionable Presence,” “Cause of Death,” “Consuming Impulse,” “Legion,” “Blessed Are the Sick,” “To Mega Therion,” “Beyond Sanctorum,” “The Red in the Sky is Ours,” “North From Here,” “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas,” “Dol Guldur,” et al. support the theory that metal bands whose creative energies extend beyond a debut album tend to perfect their original sound by album number two, at which point they must choose to completely reinvent themselves (“Obscura,” “Beneath the Remains,” “Reign in Blood,” “Symphony Masses,” “Testimony of the Ancients,” to name a few; for obvious reasons, this group is much smaller than the ones listed above and below it) or begin to slide eternally downhill into creative obscurity, at best, or unmitigated gutter trash, at worst (way too many bands to list).


In truth, aside from the farcical opening of “To Fall From the Heavens,” these ears have found but a single attempt at progressing the band’s sound, and that cautionary move ends up being an ankle-breaking misstep: specifically, Mr. Macey’s drumming.


On the two previous Mithras albums, the drums are primarily kept on-beat with the guitars (fills included, which previously, have been Macey’s greatest creative achievement as a drummer). Because of this stylistic decision, the drums on “…Legions” and “Worlds…” become a powerful accent to the guitar playing, making the guitar work feel much more massive than it does now. For “…Shadows…,” Macey creates drum patterns that fall largely on the unaccented beats of his guitar riffs/solos, and consequently, much (at times, all) of the music’s power has been lost.


“…Shadows'…” production approach also plays a part in the band’s newfound lack of power. By giving the drums and guitars a slicker, cleaner tone, the ethereal atmosphere present on “…Legions” and “Worlds…” has been almost completely sterilized. In its place, there is what feels like a plastic mold of “Worlds…,” containing some of its shape and form, but none of its personality, none of its character, and chiefly, none of its spirit.


If one is to trust the twenty year’s of trends in metal music, it seems that there are now only two directions for Mithras to go: regurgitating this same insipid formula until they fall asleep, choke, and die, or alternatively, throwing their laurels into the garbage bin, reevaluating their approach to music, and emerging with a unique vision, complete in purpose, direction, and spirit.


If the quantum-leap forward from “…Legions” to “Worlds…” is any indication of the band’s current potential, this reviewer will keep hope alive for the next Mithras release. Perhaps they should look to Kepler for inspiration.