Abominant - Upon Black Horizons

I fished this one out of a dollar bin and...
A) got what I paid for
B) unearthed a hidden treasure
C) --fill in the blank--
D) all of the above
... started filling in the blanks.

Expectations were low indeed. With the bland and blurry cover art, Deathgasm's bare bones packaging and a huge inlay picture of five dudes behind a bar stand holding their beers, I naturally anticipated crappy brutal US death metal. Imagine my relative surprise when an opening track greeted me with technically proficient blackened death metal instead.

I am unfamiliar with the band's other works, but on Upon The Black Horizons they looked quite a bit across the Atlantic for inspiration with a goal of marrying some of the less cheesy aspects of Swedish melodic tradition (for instance, Sacramentum with slight bits of earlier Dissection, if one needs a pointer) with a more brutal and old-school death metal stylizations from home. While nothing at all is original here if one were to pick each track apart brick by brick, Abominant attempted and largely succeeded in creating a diverse piece of work by sticking to more than one way of churning out and putting together their guitar riffs. The song structures are neither simplistic nor terribly complex: one set of riffs flows into another, tempos change, melodies fly, solos soar. Yet the flow of the songs and different angles of approach make this work, especially considering the fact that the band operate at a fairly high velocity.

It should also be noted that the album itself is deftly structured to augment the said flow. All the melodic mixtures fall in the beginning and the end of the record. The end particularly, as the last three songs are the most melodic on the whole album. The opening third is a bit less friendly to the untrained ear but of solid quality for the initiated. The middle is the most old school and brutal and bereft of all European "melodisms". Nuclear Assault cover "Fight to Be Free" is a great counterpoint to the black/death fusion, with an excellent solo in the beginning and a killer thrash riff. "Plague of Sores" is a short straight up death metal number, more common to the American shores. It's definitely old school and with another kicking solo tucked at the end. The only visibly weak part of the album, in my view, is the fourth track "I Can Still See The Flames", which operates with pretty redundant riffs and leads.

The vocals stay at the mid-level registry but vary from song to song. The front man tailors his screaming in accordance to the material played. Tracks with more pronounced black metal influence receive a higher pitched screaming, while the more guttural yells are saved for the prominent death metal parts. The production is fitting: clear but not polished and adequately balanced.

Definitely not the worst acquisition this fruit out of the bin is. And that much is true, even if it falls a bit too far from being a hidden treasure one always hopes to find. This brings me back to that stupid and useless multiple choice question in the beginning.

...nah, forget it, just give this album a spin and fill in a few blanks of your own.

July 23, 2010

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