Orloff - Apparitions Among the Graveyard Skies (2012)

Orloff is one of numerous projects involving Vanessa Nocera of Razorback Records, known here as 'Alucarda Bellows', and right up front there looked to be so much I was going to dig about this sole full-length, Apparitions Among the Graveyard Skies. The cover artwork is excellent, comic-book style and eerily evocative. The band's logo is great. Even reading through the lyrics, I'd have to say almost all of them are decently written, fully entrenched in the cult horror that is explored throughout much of the Razorback roster. I will even go so far as to say that the initial listening impressions had me hopeful...haunting organs cede to dingy death metal just slathered in dire melodies and even some shredding lead in the first metal tune "Cobwebbed and Decayed".

Unfortunately, Orloff really puts its best foot...fang? forward, because Apparitions feels like a whole slew of ideas programmed together into a 50 minute horror-trip, with little regard for whether they really fit or not, or to any consistency of quality. The transitions are almost universally weak. A lead or an organ section will arrive and depart with haste, like miniature interludes, only badly edited so they don't really deliver much of an impact, and just feel like they've been cobbled together from a bunch of riff ideas that were stored on a hard drive. The shredding parts are a mix of coherent and too short, or sloppy and uninteresting, where the rhythm guitars are also a mixed bag...ranging from evil, inspired vintage death/doom metal ("Nine Eternities in Doom") to the offensively banal chugging of "House Where the Beast Dwells", to "The Needful Revenge of Arthur Grimdsyke" which sounds like a pure, derivative heavy metal song with growling attached to it.

Some of the beats and fills are incredible, where in other places they feel like they're going to collapse in on themselves. Bass lines don't seem to serve much of a purpose to the music, apart from just a bulkier bottom end for the other guitars. In addition to the aforementioned organs, there are some more acidic synthesizer lines which sound like they could come from a giallo flick, only they're not very well implemented in the places they show up. Orloff also uses a few acoustic, classically styled guitar parts, which actually work out well on the instrumental title track, but feel a little jarring and wedged in elsewhere. The majority vocals are brutish and deeply guttural, while some higher pitched snarls are added in for contrast, but in either case, while they're a good fit for this style, they don't always bark out the most interesting syllabic patterns over the riffs churning out beneath them.

I'm not fully aware of the seriousness of the project, since after one demo and this album it seems to have vanished, but Apparitions Among the Graveyard Skies ultimately suffers from shoving together too many ideas which needed further gestation. Take out some of the dumber riffs that spoil it for the rest, align some of those beats and vocals a little better, and spend a long time fixing transitions, and you'd have yourself a pretty kick-ass Halloween/horror record. But as it stands, once you hit the waning moments of the album, it almost feels like the band is just as through with it as you are. Not a terrible album, just a lot of missed potential.

Horror-meter: Eight cemetery encounters out of ten.

Verdict: Indifference [6/10]

Exhorder - Slaughter in the Vatican (1990)

Exhorder is one of those bands which has benefited greatly from both the internet and the wayback machine of a modern thrash audience craving for genuine sounds from the genre's Golden Age of explosion and expansion, circa about 1985-1991. I remember picking up this tape at the local mall when it came out, largely because of its logo, artwork, and R/C records association, and giving it a few spins before setting it aside and not bothering with it except for the occasional relisten to figure out what it was that did not quite grab me in the first place. The name was mentioned in passing by a few friends, articles, radio shows, but 1990 was right on the threshold of thrash metal's popularity waning; not that it would go down without a few masterpieces that year, or ever truly vanish, but even the better records coming out were often ignored by a mainstream hesher populace that seemed satisfied with 1-4 of their 'Big Four', and at most a handful of others, before tuning over to their glam metal, or Ozzy and Dio and Sabbath, Maiden and Priest. But fast forward 15-25 years, and groups like Exhorder, Demolition and Morbid Saint find themselves with an entire new fan base mixed in with a lot of those 'oh yeah, I remember them' sorts and remaining diehards.

I am not among these, because frankly, try as I might, I don't feel any stronger about this album now than I did back when it initially dropped. There are certainly some technical aspects to Slaughter in the Vatican that I admire. This was forceful, energetic thrash, much heavier than what the more popular bands were pulling off, very much in league with a Dark Angel or Sadus. There are loads of riffs, and enough variety to pad out substantial 5-6 minute tracks without resort to banal repetition. And then of course there's the 'charismatic' and unique vocal style which Kyle Thomas brought to the table, known as a massive influence upon Pantera's Phil Anselmo who, when shifting away from his 80s power metal screaming, really popularized this style of Southern swagger and tough guy oomph. And while I've seen this debated often, I think it's rather obvious...listen to Pantera while Exhorder were releasing their demos. Listen to Pantera once they made the shift to Cowboys from Hell, and got the drop on this debut. He's absolutely been 'touched' by what he heard from his Nola friends. Not to the point where it's a complete copy, and in fact I thought Anselmo did a better job wrenching some attitude and emotion from the style, as the band's success would attest, but there it is. I'd also say that some of the thicker grooves used by the Texans were inspired by particular Exhorder riffs, but ultimately Dimebag was a more dynamic and distinct player than Labella or Ceravolo here.

And about those riffs...well, they're one of the primary reasons I've never been feeling this. All the guitar parts in general, as hammering and proficient as they are played, sounded like a rather generic hodgepodge of material that bands like Exodus, Dark Angel, Sacred Reich, Sepultura and Devastation had already unleashed upon the populace. Don't get me wrong, they are dextrous and intricate enough to exhibit that more thought had been placed into them than your garden variety Metallica clones gigging at high school talent shows, but I'll be damned if not a single one of the considerably huge array of guitar riffs on Slaughter in the Vatican stick with me for even five minutes. Whether bursting out into faster material or the denser, groove/thrash in verses to tunes like "Desecrator" (a song Pantera was clearly fond of), I just get bored hearing it again. Even when some small pattern of notes begins to align with the aural pleasure centers of my being, they'll switch it off into something else less interesting. Add to that the relative lack of good bass lines, since the very notion of that instrument seemed like an afterthought that the guitarists just played themselves, and not an independent voice that might add a little swerve and meat to the propulsive palm muting. It's frustrating, because these gentlemen could. fucking. play. Just nothing that memorable, and all the leads also feel pretty skimpy or throwaway.

The drums anchor down the belligerent pacing and muscle of the rhythm guitars rather well, but they lead me to another of my issues here...even as a teen, I could tell this was a Scott Burns mix without needing to read it in the booklet. And Burns is a guy I found very inconsistent. He's done some albums I truly love, and others which almost feel muffled and neutered by his presence (Sepultura's Arise and the first couple Deicide discs come to mind). I get that he was sort of the 'house engineer' for a lot of the Roadrunner/RC classics, and he absolutely knocked a few of them out of the park, but I just don't like some of the mix or the guitar tones he gets on albums like this one. They feel too subdued and compressed. Slaughter is not an egregiously bad example of this, but it's enough of a factor that my old cassette gathered a lot of dust until. Lastly, as much as I can appreciate Kyle's style and influence, I just wan't too into the inflection of the vocals here. Their delivery was not unfamiliar to me (I owned Cowboys from Hell already), and there's a charisma to them that a lot of run of the mill thrashers lacked, but they're about 50/50 in effectiveness for me, whereas his protegee was superior at making them seem enormous and angry, like a school bully about to pop you one on the nose. Some of the lyrics are passable, like "The Tragic Period" about Edgar Allen Poe... EXCEPT for the stupid "Anal Slut", which is beyond awful, and it creates a bit of an obnoxious aesthetic disparity to be leaping back and forth between the two on the same album.

Ultimately, going back to Slaughter in the Vatican for another round didn't yield to me the sort of cult classic that I've seen so much fawning over. It's just nothing I'd queue up when I've got so many other options I prefer. That said, it's also not an album I can find a lot to mock or complain about...apart from lyrics like "Fuck your brains out/squeeze your tits/blood on your thighs/virginity dies" which seem like a budding bucktoothed parallel to Cannibal Corpse, but unwilling to go the brutal distance. "Lust/anal lust/up the butt/lousy slut". Oh, the BUTT. I thought yous guys was referring to that other kind of anal. Sodomy overture aside, this is a competent debut, with no effort spared, that simply doesn't click with me. Accomplished, practiced mediocrity which doesn't yield even a single song I need to hear again.

Verdict: Indifference [5.75/10] (consumed by overconfident assumptions)

https://www.facebook.com/ExhorderNOLA/

Suture - Skeletal Vortex (2008)

Have to say I found the cover art to this one quite hypnotizing. While it seems little more than some haggard, lich-like being opening some sort of extra-dimensional portal in its own ribcage, the high resolution pic I was sent with the digital promo was quite beautiful, and I couldn't help but stare into it as I was listening. At any rate, Suture are a Louisiana brutal death metal act formed in the late 90s who took a hiatus shortly after this album was released through Unmatched Brutality, but have recently returned. Yes, sophomore Skeletal Vortex might 'officially' be a 2008 release, but this new version has been remixed and mastered, its dense and darkening overtures painted with a fresh coat of agony, and I can only imagine that it has benefited from the treatment.

Once again, I'm faced with a death metal group that does nothing particularly new or different than the many before it, but executes its style extremely well. Though they clearly belong to the 'brutal' niche of the genre, with the obvious influences in Immolation, Suffocation and Florida extremists like Morbid Angel and Malevolent Creation, there is something measured and contemplative about the writing which erupts whenever they break into some more soaring, tremolo melody among the more pummeling currents of the chugged and blasted rhythm guitars and drums; or a choppier, progressive pattern circa 90s Death. The titles alone, like "Escaping the Confines of my Skin", "Exiled to Undead" or "Overseer to the End of Days" would seem to imply a more philosophical bent on the brutality, but the subtle strains of melody coursing beneath the brunt of bludgeoning hint at a band who are perhaps interested in more than just the mere gore of so many fellows. Affix this to the jerking, attention keeping variation found in cuts like "Chaossuary" or the titular "Skeletal Vortex" and you've got yourself a band who can run neck in neck with some of the California crushers of late like Severed Savior, Inherit Disease, etc.

That said, Skeletal Vortex is not exactly perfect. The Deicide/Morbid Angel-like brutal grunts (and occasional layered snarls) are rhythmic and percussively sound, but they hardly distinguish themselves among the myriad others who sound almost exactly the same. A lot of the driving patterns sound like they were torn directly from the Hate Eternal/Morbid Angel playbook without adding much pizzazz, and there are a few low-end chugging patterns throughout that seem forgettable as soon as they've played out. But for an album four years old already, the new production is rich and captivating. The Louisianans know how to lock you into an eerie, extraworldly space and then beat the Jesus out of you, almost as if you were hijacked by Elder Gods who wanted your wheels. This is another 'total package' band, with musicianship, intelligence, ideas and an ability to contrast numerous emotions into the resonance of their writing: from fear to wonder. Looking forward, but skinned in the past. With bands like Suture and Alabama's Chaos Inception writing the albums we WISH Morbid Angel would put out, the South is looking mighty strong in this new era of punishment.

Verdict: Win [8/10]

http://www.myspace.com/suture

Excommunicated - Skeleton Key (2011)

Louisiana is generally a territory most associate with the sludge and doom scene, but when I read that Excommunicated balanced a hybrid of black and death metal, I admit I was expecting a direct parallel to the sound of their statesmen Goatwhore. Instead, they are actually quite versatile, and I can hear everything from thrash and grind to the advertised death and black (the last through only a handful of riffs and snarled vocals, admittedly). The lyrics and titles would seem to suggest a sacrilegious leaning akin to many extreme metal acts out of the US, but the sound they've pinpointed is distinct enough that they could call it their own, even if it does occasionally spread the quality of their debut, Skeleton Key, somewhat thin.

Variation is the crux of their ability, and thus one should not expect any two tracks here to sound precisely the same. For example, "The Incorruptibles" begins as a rather average melodic black metal passage, then peters out to brutal death metal with a hint of grind. "Cry to Heaven" flows from an eerie folk/blues intro to a warm, almost majestic mix of pagan metal bombast and post hardcore threads, while the double bass hammers away underneath. "The Vatican Orgies" has a more technical bent to it, with intricate and catchy riffing cycles and bloodcurdling vocals. The array of weaponry at display is formidable, and the competence in both drumming and guitars is unavoidable. Excommunicated have also seen fit to adorn their compositions with all manner of surprises, like the atmospheric bridge of "The Sum of Life's Pain" with its doomy drawl and drifting, dark pianos. The use of vocal samples, chants, and stylistic segues leaves a more novel and complete impression, a well rounded experience.

Skeleton Key also benefits from a clear, yet punchy production that capitalizes upon the obvious proficiency of the band. Clear without seeming over-polished, they keep their time well, and the various outside influences on the music are mixed seamlessly into the froth of extremity and groove. The one real element that stymied my enjoyment was that the riffs, as acrobatic as they are, are never all that memorable. A few exceptions, like "The Vatican Orgies" or "Keys to the Kingdom of God" do exist here, with a taut and penetrating notation, but the lions share of the tracks don't quite sink in. That said, they always keep the composition busy enough that you don't have much time to actually dwell upon this fact, and the band's myriad talents and compounding of metallic sub-genres surface more than not.

Skeleton Key is an experience of which the components all possess a precedent, but the precise fashion by with the Louisiana quartet formulate them into a bludgeoning, writing whole is distinct enough for those seeking something both punishing and clean. The potential here is staggering, even if this debut doesn't hit all the marks of a classic.

Verdict: Win [7/10]