Pestilence
Spheres
[Roadrunner]
Pestilence is quite a classic Dutch death metal band. It’s rare for a death
metal fan to not be familiar with at least their first one, ”Consvming Impulse”.
”Spheres” is their third and last album (if I am not suffering from dementia)
and the point where a large part of the audience lost interest.
However, I retain interest.
In here, Mameli has become, to say the least, obsessed with MIDI guitars and the album is full of fusion jazz influenced MIDI guitar solos, passages and interludes. They are not easy to stomach if one is expecting simple gore brutality, but they make this an important and unique metal album. The vocals are harshly shouted much in the same way as they were in the Pestilence album before this, or later Death. There is no fast blasting or double-bass to be found in the rhythms of this album, but it’s obvious that they do not belong here. Many of the highly technical guitar riffs are memorable in their unique way of transcending beyond ”melody” to create music from the un-musical, as is the way of death metal.
This is truly modern death metal, not commercialized, not wimped out, but progressed. The intricacies and complexities that death metal has been evolving towards since the prototype Slayer, are manifest here, and in ”Spheres” it reaches a level of universal communicative art. This is no longer a genre work, but it does not mean that it has NO CORE, it means that it’s essence is beyond the definitions of this era of metal and it can only be properly placed within a context when looking back from a couple of decades later.
After all this praise, I would say that I am not the best person to talk about jazz influences, or that I would even be a person to appreciate them. But that is what partially makes this record all the more interesting for me. It is a new realm of musical communication for me, those light, chaotic, dissonant waves of sound hanging in the air with no apparent motive.
Undisciplined and socialized, might say someone initiated into the abyss of METAL life, music and esotericism. I won’t disagree. But I know that passing by this work would have been a mistake on my part.
© 1999 black hate
However, I retain interest.
In here, Mameli has become, to say the least, obsessed with MIDI guitars and the album is full of fusion jazz influenced MIDI guitar solos, passages and interludes. They are not easy to stomach if one is expecting simple gore brutality, but they make this an important and unique metal album. The vocals are harshly shouted much in the same way as they were in the Pestilence album before this, or later Death. There is no fast blasting or double-bass to be found in the rhythms of this album, but it’s obvious that they do not belong here. Many of the highly technical guitar riffs are memorable in their unique way of transcending beyond ”melody” to create music from the un-musical, as is the way of death metal.
This is truly modern death metal, not commercialized, not wimped out, but progressed. The intricacies and complexities that death metal has been evolving towards since the prototype Slayer, are manifest here, and in ”Spheres” it reaches a level of universal communicative art. This is no longer a genre work, but it does not mean that it has NO CORE, it means that it’s essence is beyond the definitions of this era of metal and it can only be properly placed within a context when looking back from a couple of decades later.
After all this praise, I would say that I am not the best person to talk about jazz influences, or that I would even be a person to appreciate them. But that is what partially makes this record all the more interesting for me. It is a new realm of musical communication for me, those light, chaotic, dissonant waves of sound hanging in the air with no apparent motive.
Undisciplined and socialized, might say someone initiated into the abyss of METAL life, music and esotericism. I won’t disagree. But I know that passing by this work would have been a mistake on my part.
© 1999 black hate