Review Summary: Can you hear us now?
Metal has been particularly heavy of late. I know that kind of says nothing, an expression so obvious it actually goes without saying but deep down the mainstream music of bands who cut their teeth with accessible cores of groove, sung choruses, breakdowns and crowd interaction of the last twenty years have mostly become shells of their former selves. Still vague? Sure. I’m talking about an age of acts that most of us grew up with, not knowing just how deep the scene would become, how “brutal” or progressive it could be. It’s left the door open for some of the genre’s more extreme niches to really lay down their own foundations. Case in point: the Big Apple’s very own Asystole and their debut full-length,
Siren To Blight.
Which is cool because Asystole is new right? Another act ready to bludgeon at the masses with burly riffs and more snarled vocals.
Siren To Blight at least smacks—with aggression, with weight. It’s as if Asystole simply asked themselves “how to be heavy” and ran with it whole-heartedly. The record’s opening statement (and it is exactly that) “Blanketed In Flies” saunters, a molten amalgamation of every death metal stereotype this side of the nineties. Winding riffs through a cacophony as habitual and possibly incurable as the death metal genre itself. You see,
Siren To Blight’s tracks hardly reinvent the wheel but serve better as a time capsule of rage twenty years behind the eight ball. “Hollow Penance” much like the opener, is thick across the breadth of the track—but the crux here and elsewhere is that as much as
Siren To Blight is just adequately done right. Nothing more, and definitely nothing less.
As much as
Siren To Blight somehow ticks all the right boxes, hits all the right notes, and
does everything a modern death metal album should do I can’t help but feel like this is just going to fall to the side of death metal debuts that did the job and were forgotten soon thereafter. “Privatio Malus” and its counterparts are a bop, but I’m unlikely to spin this album again this year.
