Review Summary: A relentlessly aggressive and often beautiful, harsh and impressively technical album, Atlantis: The New Beginning's own lack of restraint and reuse of melodies and ideas trips it up all too soon.
Polish death metal band Lost Soul have held a reasonable degree of acclaim since the 2000s, with albums like
Chaostream and
Immerse in Infinity wielding an interesting balanced style of death metal, with the power of Tucker-era
Morbid Angel and the technicality of more recent tech-death bands. With Atlantis: The New Beginning comes some lineup changes, with only the lead guitarist/vocalist Jacek Grecki and bassist Damian Czajkowski remaining in the fold from their previous outing, and with the new members comes an intriguing new style akin to
Behemoth crossed with
Decapitated. Rabidly fast and intense but with some minor blackened death metal elements and some more dissonant leanings, this album certainly impresses on first listen and stands as a fairly unique and sufficiently bludgeoning effort.
An initial problem is apparent from the get go - despite some incredibly dense instrumentation, the production is simultaneously not particularly heavy and too cluttered, with a somewhat overbearing drum sound taking over the overall soundscape but without any power in the toms. The vocals are also relatively one note and have excessive effects on them, leading to them clouding the mix. Unlike Immerse in Infinity, which had a pretty impressive bass performance, it's functionally a non-entity here. In general, with an increased technical edge on the guitars, the vocals and bass seem to have been scaled back, and the production has sapped some of the weight of the bass without adding clarity.
The opener
Hypothelemus wastes no time in exhibiting the whole scope of the band's sound for the record, swiftly shifting from relentless dissonant tech-death to atmospheric blackened death metal and back over its nine minute course. It does, however, exhibit the main recurring issues: a lack of restraint, and weak transitions. Despite some relentless aggressive instrumentation, it does take a long time to get into its verse, when it probably would have been more sensible to trim some of the flashier fat to get into the meat of the song. With the less clear transitions, it feels disjointed from part to part, making it hard to trace where exactly the band plans to go.
A big problem for the album is that most of the tracks are simply variants on the same densely-packed formula of
Hypothelemus, with similar tones, melodies and songwriting styles that make the tracks blend together.
Ravines of Rapture thankfully adds some slower and more melodic parts that flow together nicely, with a great dual lead break and some nice groove;
Unicornis and the rather catchy
The Next Generation focus on these groovier elements significantly more and helps wrestle the album out of being too samey too early on. Unfortunately, further deviation from the core, and admittedly initially very entertaining technical blackened death metal fundamental sound doesn't really continue.
This problem gets compounded by the album's length. At 1 hour and 7 minutes, Atlantis's relentless and dense sound gets tiring quickly, and often the tracks utilise much the same songwriting tricks to fill out their runtimes. Shorter tracks like
False Testimony and
Frozen Volcano are welcome, getting to the point a bit faster whilst not trading out any intensity or extravagance. Unfortunately, the desperation to cram many different riffs, and variations on those riffs, and variations on melodies over those riffs, and so on, brings down some of the longer tracks, and their complexity ceases to impress when the tricks used are the same ones you've been hearing the whole time.
Atlantis: The New Beginning has a pretty drastic difference in effectiveness when listening to tracks individually compared to the whole album. The technicality, bristling lead work and black metal tinges make it stand out from most other bands and its sheer energy makes any one track positively excellent in isolation. As a whole, however, the recycling of ideas and excessive density make it lose potency and become somewhat bloated. It's hard to really identify many of the tracks due to their somewhat same-y riffs and the sheer number of parts in any one track, and it unfortunately degrades what would otherwise be an extremely impressive and reasonably unique effort.
