Dir en grey -- 'Uroboros' [review]

Dir en grey - Uroboros
The End Records (11/11/08)
Metal (Melodic) / Rock

While perhaps not quite at the level of Opeth or Dream Theater, Dir en grey is Japan's answer to the aforementioned bands, proving it with a solid decade-long career and this, the band's seventh studio album.

Uroboros is a mixture of metal and progressive rock—a combination of beauty, bliss, horror and destruction. Dir en grey combines elements from all corners of the metal/rock genres to put forth a cacophony of pandemonium, all the while vocalist Kyo, singing almost exclusively in Japanese, wails, growls and grunts along like a frenzied madman.

Opening with the one-two punch of the instrumental "Sa Bir" and epic "Vinushka" (which clocks in at over nine minutes), it's clear the band is happy to take chances. While "Vinushka" may come across as bloated at moments, the song is a sonic journey, bouncing from acoustic beauty to peaks of power metal and depths of death metal, again and again.

The band takes its experimental approach even further with "Stuck Man", a head-banging blend of funk and death metal.

But it's those moments of tight musicianship when Dir en grey produces its best songs. Take the straight-forward "Red Soil", with its driving riffs and stutter-stop verses, or the blinding fury of "Doukoku to Sarinu", or the radio-friendly modern-rock feel of "Glass Skin". These 3- to 4-minute songs display a better sense of the best the band has to offer as opposed to, say, the self-indulgent 7-minute plus "Ware, Yami, Tote..." that aims for epic but hits overly-dramatic instead.

Two nice touches with the album: the liner notes contain all the lyrics translated into English, which shows the band weaving tales of reincarnation and guilt; and two versions of "Dozing Green" included on this set, one sung in English, the other in Japanese (which only shows that, with a frontman like Kyo, it matters not what language the songs are sung in).

Any fan of Opeth, Tool or any progressive metal outfits will find more than a few things to love on this album.

Cryptopsy -- 'The Unspoken King' [review]

Cryptopsy - The Unspoken King
Century Media Records (6/24/08)
Technical death metal

While not completely rare, it's not every day you see the type of blowback like that which is plaguing Cryptopsy for its latest release. The band is getting negative reviews across the boards from longtime fans, who are accusing them of selling out to the metalcore scene to make money. Hell, the last time a furor like this was reached in metal circles was probably back in 2003 when Metallica released St. Anger.

So is all the hate really warranted?

Cryptopsy was upfront before the release of this album. The Unspoken King was going to mark a new direction and be more experimental for the band. Before hiring frontman Matt McGachy, the band said it was looking for someone who could sing clean as well as do the usual growls.

The Unspoken King opens inauspiciously enough. "Worship Your Demons" is a quick little kick in the teeth, an extreme helping of straight-up death metal, as McGachy immediately slides into the lead vocalist slot with vengeance, serving up guttural wails with little effort.

However, the following track, "The Headsmen" is much more dynamic in its assault. Flo Mounier absolutely destroys with his drumming, combining speed and precision in such a way few others seem able to do (never sounding completely out-of-control or taking over the track). The guitar work incorporates more technical aspects as well.

"Silence the Tyrants" marks the last of the typical Cryptopsy attack. The song has a lot of really interesting groove underlying the usual death-metal fare, but is otherwise nondescript.

And then this train just seems to derail.

On "Bemoan the Martyr", the band seems to be channeling the Deftones at one moment before sliding back into its usual approach. (The cleaner, wailing vocals bookend the song, which actually makes things sound forced in this case.)

And that's pretty much how the rest of the album plays out; the death-metal staples are tempered with cleaner singing and slower moments. There's some truly inspired, intricate guitar play on "Resurgence of an Empire", and McGachy has some great clean vocals on "The Plagued" and "Contemplate Regicide". Plus, there's a couple of breakdowns thrown in for good measure. And take a listen to the great bridge thrown in to the middle of "Leach", which is probably the best song on the album.

In the end, it would appear that fans may have overreacted with The Unspoken King. Death metal is not the most inventive or imaginative genre, and Cryptopsy isn't the first band to attempt to pull in different elements to shake things up a bit. The band actually doesn't do half-bad with this effort. In fact, the biggest issue to take with this album is actually due to something you can't even hear. The group went through the trouble to hire on a keyboard player (Maggy Durand, listed as a permanent band member), yet any elements she may add to the songs is either overpowered by everything else or nonexistent altogether.

The playlist was put together perfectly, as the new "sound" is incorporated a little at a time until the listener gets used to where the band was headed. And the cleaner moments really add an interesting dynamic to the band, especially on a song like "Bound Dead", where the vocals are multi-tracked at times with a subtle growl under the clean vocals. This is what Cryptopsy should be doing more of if this is truly the direction the band hopes to follow.

Unfortunately, a lot of times the cleaner material comes across as contrived, and the changes seem to be there just to exist, instead of making sense from a song structure standpoint. This makes most of the album seem torn in different directions for absolutely no reason.

In the end, you're left with an unfocused effort that has its moments and shows potential growth for the future. "Bound Dead" (which is phenomenal, by the way) and "Leach" are obvious high points. The rest is a mixed bag.

Between the Buried and Me -- 'Colors' [review]

Between the Buried and Me - Colors
Victory Records (9/18/07)
Progressive metal / Metalcore / ????



Many albums are released and declared as great; few are released and considered an event.

Such is the case with Between the Buried and Me's latest album, Colors.

There isn't another genre-bending band this extreme in the music scene today. The band incorporates so many elements to its sound, with a calculated precision, that upon the first couple of listens it's almost hard to wrap your mind around what has been created. And it hasn't really crafted an album. Rather, Colors is a journey across a musical soundscape. Sure, the album is split into eight tracks, but each bleeds into the next, shifting from genre to genre at a sometimes breakneck pace, but always with a purpose.

Take the opener "Foam Born" the song kicks off with a soulful piano opening, with vocals reminiscent of late Beatles material, before devolving into a hardcore dirge. The vocal harmonies drifting over the hard-rock riffing gives way to a solid synthesizer bridge before the death-metal vocals kick in. And somehow the band manages to get it to all make sense, musically.

It's hard to take this album track to track -- at just over a hour in length, it was made to be experienced in full, instead of in separate pieces. It's important to make note of the high points of the album' from the melodic vocal bridge on "Informal Gluttony" and the driving drumming throughout "White Walls", to the mellow, psychedelic guitar play on "Viridian", the intricate prog guitar work on the mammoth "Ants of the Sky" (an over 13-minute opus) and the absolutely breathtaking guitar play on "Prequel to the Sequel" (giving way to the almost polka-esque breakdown mid-way through the song).

And if forced, one would easily point to "Sun of Nothing" as the album's high point. From the rapid-fire drum and death metal opening, to the acoustic guitar bridges and combination clean and hardcore vocals, to the jazz-influenced mid-song breakdown, the European metal-flavored guitar riffs ... this song just seems to have a little of everything. And it's presented in a perfect package, with each segment flowing from piece to piece so that, even though the styles are so drastically different, it makes perfect sense to shift to the next part.

Each minute of Colors is a surprise. The band does a fantastic job of pushing the boundaries of the music it creates. There's (maybe) a minute or two where it almost misses the mark, but it's hard not to with music this experimental. If you ever wanted to know what it would sound like if Obituary, Remembering Never, Tool and Pink Floyd were one band, pick up this album. If you want to hear musical limits pushed to the boundaries, pick up this album. If you want to hear one of the best albums of the year (and maybe decade), pick up this album.

Tool -- 'Aenima' [classic review]

Tool
"Aenima"
(Volcano Records)


"... a jagged, brooding nightmare filled with roaring guitars, abrupt rhythm shifts, and jarring sound effects. One of 1996's strangest and strongest alt-metal records."

-- from Entertainment Weekly's review of "Aenima"

"Aenima" is one of those albums that, after release, seemed to yield hit after hit. Each subsequent single seemed better than the one before. From the title track to "Stinkfist" to "Eulogy" to "H" to "Forty-Six and 2" and "Hooker with a Penis," the hits never stopped. Anything that wasn't released, very well could have.

"Aenima" has a fairly sterile feel to it. The production is crisp and the tone undoubtedly foreboding. Whether the band is tackling the destruction of L.A. (on the title track), death ("Eulogy"), drugs ("H") or even the taboo topic of fisting (on "Stinkfist" -- think about it, this song is on national radio since its release to this day), the message is quick and to the point and conveyed with a deadpan delivery. Even the instrumental and other interludes seamlessly flow between the tracks and pull the rest of the tracks into one complete cohesive unit.

The beauty of the Tool sound is that it isn't an in-your-face assault. Rather than the percussive unit, the guitar is the driving force behind the music and the rhythm is what propels the album. Not quite tech-metal, not quite an industrial durge, the focused delivery is what makes this album a classic.

The album and band pulls you in with a hard-hitting assault and then keeps shifting and changing the tempo and direction in such a pure manner that you feel powerless to stop the onslaught. That's the true beauty of the album. You can pull any nugget out and it sits perfectly alone. But it also fits into this complex puzzle of sound. You could never change the tracklist order for "Aenima," but each piece can be enjoyed on its own.

Mastodon -- 'Leviathan' [review]

Mastodon
"Leviathan"
Relapse Records


Every once in a while a band comes along that demands people stand up and take notice.

Mastodon is one of those bands.

Yet, it's clear that the means to get music fans to take notice of this band is escaping people. There's a slight buzz hovering around the band in metal circles at the moment (those that don't already sing the band's praises). The sticker on the groups latest offering suggests a mix of older Metallica and Rush, but that's not it at all.

At its heart, Mastodon is a metal band, but it's impossible to stick that one-word "label" on it and even come close to what the band is creating: a brutal mix of metal, southern, sludgey rock (a la Clutch or Corrosion of Conformity) and mind-bending, complex, technical music mastery.

There's so many layers to the band's sound, hearing each song time after time is a continuous journey of discovery. Within the confines of each track, which range in length from two to four minutes with one whopping 13 plus minute song, the band throws multiple time changes out, morphing from one style to the next, without missing a beat.

Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor is a venerable beast behind the kit, leaving listeners' heads spinning with the various fills and breakdowns from moment to moment. Troy Sanders works off Dailor nicely. Rarely following the guitarists, he lays down tracks that accompany the drumming to the fullest. Guitarist/vocalists Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher play off each other tremendously, with solid, heavy riffing that can give way to melodic interludes while still maintaining a certain air of urgency that propels the music forward throughout the album. The vocals are the final piece to this complex puzzle. And, while it's safe to say of any band, the vocals are as important to the Mastodon sound as any instrumentation -- they drift from husky groans to deathly screams to straight-forward rocking prose in the least jarring of fashion.

The album itself seems loosely based on the tale of Moby Dick, right down to the cover art and song titles ("I Am Ahab," "Seabeast"). But, much like the book, the tales woven through the songs can be taken at many different levels -- like Ahab, we all have our own beast to track down.

The album explodes from the get-go with "Blood and Thunder." Dailor immediately goes to work with his intricate drumming and never seems to let up. Clutch's Neil Fallon shows up on this track to add his own flair to the vocals. And later on, Scott Kelly (he of Neurosis) helps out on vocals during "Aqua Dementia."

The complex nature of the music works two-fold here: a song like "I Am Ahab," that clocks in at a little under three minutes, feels like an epic, while "Hearts Alive," the nearly 14 minute masterpiece, seemingly goes by in the blink of an eye. Hinds and Kelliher's genre-bending riffing throughout this song (and the album as a whole) is one of the group's many spotlights.

It's clear, in the end, the only thing the band really needs for anyone and everyone to stand up and take notice, is for only a few seconds of time, a few bars of a song, a moment in your life ... just to hear the littlest output from the band ... and you'll be hooked. That is all it will take for you to see the brilliance hiding, packaged in this "metal band."