Review Summary: This is what all those deathcore bands with a symphonic gimmick like Winds of Plague or early Make them Suffer should have been in the first place.
Watching deathcore evolve over the years has been an interesting process. To make a grand generalization - the origins were wonky and pig squeal-laden, borrowing heavily from grind, slam and brutal death metal. Then came a long era of utter mediocrity and unmemorability (occasional flashes of brilliance aside) - basically just basic death metal with mandatory, forcibly crammed-in breakdowns. In recent years, there has been a considerable radiation in styles and sensibilities - with blackened and symphonic flavors coming to the forefront - some bands opting to revisit the roots of the genre, others borrowing only certain of its tropes and using them as but a single ingredient in a more nuanced sound. But throughout its entire history, deathcore has been a genre of frustration - on many levels and for many reasons. In the old days they may have still tried to play interesting riffs, use breakdowns sparingly and integrate them into the song structures at least passably well - but on the other hand pig squeals were ubiquitous (not everyone's cup of tea), and weird tongue-in-cheek scene tropes ran rampant (
Dr. Acula, anyone?). Later on, the genre may have become somewhat more palatable by excising these "controversial" elements - but songwriting, variety and intricacy all suffered in turn - something from which the genre still hasn't completely recovered, despite leaning more heavily on symphonic and melodic death metal elements in recent years. But even with the popularity of these new genre admixtures, another trend has arisen in parallel - where vocalists have seemingly started to think that songs are a competition of who can emit an unnatural shriek or gurgle in more different ways than their competitors can (
Shadow of Intent,
Brand of Sacrifice,
Lorna Shore - looking at you, guys) - while many find the variety interesting, it does get tiresome and distracting after some time - especially since it comes with the fact that song structures still tend to be subordinate to this perceived necessity of providing opportunities for such vocal showcases, with needlessly extended breakdowns and all the associated aural drudgery. So yeah - no matter what era of deathcore you prefer, finding an album that doesn't have at least a single annoying aspect or missed opportunity is very, very difficult. Luckily,
She Must Burn's
Umbra Mortis happens to be one such album.
She Must Burn are a London-based band, which is perhaps one of the reasons they don't sound quite like their American or Australian peers (biggest bastions of contemporary symphonic deathcore), and I mean that as a compliment. With two EPs under their belt, and the first LP released in 2017, this year's
Umbra Mortis is their second full-length effort.
The first thing you will notice when listening to this album is the extensive and impressive use of operatic female vocals - whereas the intro song
Nine may lead you to believe it's just some guest appearance, not to be heard on the album again - keyboardist/vocalist Valis Volkova is actually very much a permanent member, and there's plenty of her throughout the entire album, and I mean plenty - unlike bands such as
Make Them Suffer, who use their female keyboardist/singer very sparingly (and usually founder completely when they try doing it more), here most songs will have an actual sung chorus by Valis - not at all unlike what you could expect of bona fide female-fronted bands outside of death metal, such as
Nightwish or
Amaranthe. But despite the music being just as heavy as you might expect, this continuous usage of female vocals doesn't detract from it at all - on the contrary in fact, possibly owing to the band's great European sense of melody - something most American bands unfortunately happen to struggle with (suppose coming from the homeland of Cradle of Filth may also play a role here). The great phrasing in the sung verses immediately draws attention, as do the melodies themselves, being evocative of classical music, with heavy melancholic and romantic vibes. The growler, Kyle Lamb, is also perfectly adequate - with a clear and pleasant growl timbre and capability of switching effortlessly between powerful high shrieks and very satisfying low growls - but fortunately eschewing all those annoying guttural gymnastics that are so popular with many other bands today.
Vocal layer aside, the music was clearly well thought out here. The album lasts only just shy of 38 minutes, and despite that the band still opted to devote almost four of them to an acoustic intro and interlude. The songs all stand on their own and carry their own ideas, some more melancholic, some more ominous and black metal-esque. Most listeners of symphonic-leaning deathcore will recognize the choices of instrumentation right away, with typical blast beat verses and underlying symphonies - only this time it's done with no repetition, and a level of cohesion that could only be dreamed of by She Must Burn's predecessors. Song structures flow smoothly and breakdowns are really few - but integrated so well that they're not only not a chore - but actually welcome - and hit super hard when they come in, such as in the final parts of the closer song,
The Serpent. People have been playing deathcore for 20 years now, and yet it's still for some reason an extremely difficult concept to understand for most of them that integrating the "mandatory breakdown" into a song should be done in a way that serves the song, not the breakdown - but She Must Burn pass this test with flying colors. Much better in fact than the album that
Umbra Mortis will inevitably be getting compared to, due to having incidentally been released on the same day: Lorna Shore's
Pain Remains, despite all the interesting moments that album has. This one has a lot of things working in its favor compared to its rival - the length, the variety, the ease of listening, the moments, the tastefulness, the songwriting...
And most importantly, the fact that you just don't need to fish for the good moments and skip the bad or tedious ones. Like mentioned in the opening paragraph - when deathcore was all mediocre, it tended to be all listenable too. Recently on the other hand, there have been more great moments in deathcore, but as if to compensate, there are also now more crappy, tedious and annoying moments than before due to the proclivity of top bands to indulge in exaggerated renditions of early deathcore tropes.
Umbra Mortis has none of these problems though, and for that alone the album should be celebrated.
She Must Burn are winners, because they don't care about proving to you how "brutal" or heavy-hitting they can be - instead they just care about writing good songs. Catchy, easy to listen, engaging, full of interesting moments -
Umbra Mortis is a perfect, if rare example of a "guiltless pleasure" deathcore album - there's just nothing spoiling your listening pleasure to be found here. To be perfectly fair, at this point calling it just "deathcore" is probably not doing it justice, but even people who think all the bad stuff in deathcore is actually good should still be able to enjoy this album - apart from all the rest, who are definitely going to.
