Cadaver - ...In Pains
Review: A prescient band emerging late in the influence of Scandinavian death metal, Cadaver merged the rising trend toward melodic composition in death and black metal with a tendency toward progressive music with intensive rhythmic pause and inflection used for structural purposes. Within this idea, this Norwegian band made intelligent and highly inventive death metal with riffing which, similarly to the work of Austrians Disharmonic Orchestra, converges into dark and confusing passages of sound in which it wanders before emerging.
Portraits of neurosis, each work has to invent its own nothingness before any desire it has toward completion emerges, at which point intricate self-reflective patterns cycle down the conceptual levels of their own creation to self-reduce toward nothingness. The resulting music adeptly changes direction in midair and brings its melodies home with percussive, uneven resolution, using synchronized strumming of power chord notes in even phrases which slide on expectation and pause adroitly before resuming into recognizable cadence. Influences of Swedish death metal are present in the exacting flutterstrum which shapes textures from reverberant columns of electric sound.
Where this album is strong, the distinctive flavor of its understated but potently rhythmic riffing and long linear developments within songs binds its gathered influences into a narrative shaped by the same hand and thus, an organic fusion of metal to date. In its depths of expression, this release falls in metal history alongside the first Darkthrone album as an effort to make dark metal, between the aggression of death and the somber nature of other morbid music, which moved the mind into a hypnotic ambience of negativity and disillusionment. More than in black metal in the status quo, emotional or logical statements exchange more rapidly within songs yet the haunting comfort in nothingness is still present in stygian immersion.