Review Summary: God's Word delivered with real thunder.
Becoming the Archetype is at the top of the Christian heavy music heap. They’ve only had two full albums released, both chock full of brutality, barrel-chested vocals, and technicality to make all those campy Christian bands’ heads spin.
Terminate Damnation is BTA’s first album and the better of their two by a fair distance. It’s more technical, more original, and more variant than The Physics of Fire. Granted, between albums Becoming lost half their staff to becoming a mere four-piece outfit, which hinders your sound a bit, as many bands find out the hard way.
The songs on Damnation are, at their best, technical ferociousness and thundering vocals from Jason Wisdom (also the bassist). At their worst, the songs are just plain LONG. Listen to Elegy in its entirety and you’ll see my point. That’s not really the worst thing they can do, the song is still a masterpiece, nor the most uncommon thing, BTA being a tech death band.
Even amidst the battle-ready lyrics and pulverizing chaos of The Epigone and Into Oblivion and most of the 11-minute epic Elegy, with the drums and guitars pummeling along like a boulder pounding down a mountain, there are beautiful interludes of acoustic guitar and “Count” Seth Hecox’s keyboards. There’s even a full acoustic track, Night’s Sorrow, that’s nothing but twanging, unabridged acoustic splendor. Denouement is mostly acoustic as well, but blended and smoothed over distant electric guitar drones. The best part is, these almost gentle elements are perfectly meshed with the fierceness of the vocalist Jason Wisdom’s roars and the pure metal that the rest of the album so forcefully delivers.
This ferocity, most prominent in Into Oblivion, One Man Parade, and The Epigone, is what truly makes Becoming the Archetype a gem. They take a stereotypically soft subject and mash it into life metal that doesn’t hold back. Becoming the Archetype IS death metal, REAL death metal, not the pansy stuff some Christian bands like to pull off. It’s simply put to lyrics at the opposite end of the spectrum. BTA sings about Jesus and fighting for the glory of God, but they do it with an unrivaled rage Ex Nihilo will shove in your ears and pound deep through your eardrums with a war hammer.
In case it’s not obvious, this album gets a 5 from me. Perfection. Careful if you choose to get The Physics of Fire though, it doesn’t quite live up to the epic, war-charge metal of its predecessor.
Recommended: Into Oblivion, One Man Parade, The Epigone, The Trivial Paroxysm.
