Review Summary: The little original material present here is some of the best atmospheric death metal out there.
After their death-thrash phase with
The Gallery of Bleeding Art, Swedish death metal band Diabolical shifted toward a
Behemoth-lite style with Ars Vitae, an EP with only 2 original full songs along with some remastered tracks from their demos and some live tracks. Compared to their later material, which struggles a bit to find a comfortable middle ground between atmosphere and intensity, on Ars Vitae they mostly drop their faster and more technical inclinations to provide some catchy, anthemic death metal tunes. Whilst for many bands this would be a pretty terrible move, here it works very well.
After a pretty short opening instrumental,
Sightless Six comes in and sets the basic blueprint; mid-paced, vocally led, with minor symphonic elements, it showcases a change in songwriting priorities from simply good riffing to well-rounded soundscapes. Dynamic, controlled, and reasonably restrained with enough variation to keep it fresh and interesting, it's a pretty superb modern death metal track. The drums never really push beyond double kicks and simpler grooves, and the bass is essentially a non-entity, but the overall sound is still exciting and layered. With a short instrumental out of the way it then gets into the similar track,
Eye, which has many of the same qualities, with a slightly better hook, more technical guitar work, and a more consistently bleak tone. Altogether these two tracks are some of the best Behemoth worship out there and if the EP only consisted of them, it'd be pretty faultless outside a short runtime.
Unfortunately there is more here and none of it is as interesting as the original tracks. The live performances of material from their previous albums are pretty good, but the style is very different and pretty same-y, which results in it basically having no purpose outside of the pretty non-existent fanbase of this band. The remastered demo tracks are frankly pretty bad and don't really offer anything beyond some fairly competent
Heartwork worship with bad production. Had they dropped these and just put the live tracks this would be a much better overall package.
Despite its shortcomings, the two tracks that you would ever listen to this for are both great, accessible slabs of death metal for the whole family. It's somewhat regrettable that they shifted to a denser sound after this EP, considering what a clean balance is on display here, and having more than 2 tracks in this style would have been great, but for what it's worth and considering nobody really expects much of this, it's a pretty great little EP.
