Lantern take the Finnish black and death metal and move it back in time towards eighties speed metal to better appeal to a funderground hipster audience who never bothered to listen to Beherit or Demigod. The production of II: Morphosis is clean but slightly cavernous and vocals that sound like Per Boder of God Macabre help deceive inattentive millennials that Lantern are quality death metal and not Finnish Pantera.
Lantern’s riffs are mainly rooted in speed metal and the crossover thrash that pretends to be the false genre of “war metal” rather than in Bolt Thrower like most good Finnish death metal. Drumming is hardcore rooted like Celtic Frost and thrash metal. Song structures are mostly random speed metal riff salads that sound like a a mediocre speed metal band heard Morbid Angel and decided to try to toughen up less experience “The Pain Divine” in the nineties. Lantern’s pace is lukewarm; the band do not seem eager to make any point other than “We want to play death metal like our countrymen!”. Yet they can’t.
Leads sometimes echo the esoteric melodies of earlier Finnish death and black metal that borrowed liberally from Brazilian death/black/speed metal and French heavy metal. The other half of the time resemble what happened when guitar wankers realized glam rock was out and speed metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, and Sodom were becoming massively popular in the late 80s and wanted a piece of the pie to hilariously awful effect in bands such as Testament. II: Morphosis is as such a container of cake frosting halfway willed with arsenic with no cake to spread it on.
Lantern certainly have potential in many of their songs with sometimes effective riffing and leads but never continue the narrative, of the main riff, preferring to meander about like a speed metal band who doesn’t speed. Their song structures sound like another dumbed down and slowed down speed metal band with glam rock musicians known as Pantera. They squander every opportunity to progress to profundity. The overall impression of listening to II: Morphosis is similar to watching a dying insect wiggle around on the ground neither giving up hope nor flying away to continue its brief life. Fans of Finnish black and death metal would do best to stomp it and continue listening to the classic Beherit, Demigod, and Demilich CDs and stick to Desecresy and Serpent Ascending for more novel takes on the Finnish sound.
Tags: 2017, dark descent, dark descent records, death metal, Finland, funderground, II: morphosis, lantern, review, Speed Metal, wanking
I remember hearing the first track of this album a few weeks back, it went nowhere and there was nothing enticing or original about it.
You are correct though that this release is spreading through the “funderground”
So much effort on presentation, such little effort on the music. That artist is getting paid too little for this shit.
It’s the same problem with all Dark Descent bands, they all write never ending tossed riff salads that never settle on a point or direction and instead stand of showcases of “look at all the varieties of metal riffs we can cram into a 12 minute song!”. It’s the guitarists jamming on his couch with a recorder on, and no riffs get tossed except into the salad which people excitedly anticipate licking on then the CD, double LP, cassette, T-shirt bundles have no real life pass their pre-release hype and live on sorta in random Facebook posts where someone needs peer approval so they post themselves with one of these articles. I doubt this or any other DD releases (that aren’t re-releases) will ever contain a song you can go to another country and sing a line or hum a riff and have other people join in solidarity. Metal does not do that anymore.
The Imprecation album was good. That’s the only album DD released that I can remember anything from.
That’s pretty much the “good old days” for that label, when it was that and Death Strike and Timeghoul, times have changed.
Somewhat down-tuned neon-coloured plastic. Suffers heavily from “can’t figure out what I actually want to do” disease. One gets an impression of the person who committed all the instrumental parts wandering through “Extreme Metal Poundland” (“Everything’s 1£!”) and randomly picking stuff from the shelves, “Hey! This looks cool, let’s have some of this! And that looks cool, too, let’s have some as well!”. The drumming is lame. The vocal extertion is mostly shouted and comes with an echo-effect so that it sounds like 1 1/2 people shouting in the neighbouring cave who are close to succumbing to exhaustion.
“Get pickled!”
I fucking love you WILL YOU PLEASE SUBMIT SOME REVIEWS