Review Summary: ever cave digging
A year ago several of you said that I’d become more disillusioned with melodic death metal as time went on -- and dammit it, you were all right.
In Flames’
Come Clarity sounds like a watered-down appetizer for something like
Arghoslent or
Deathevocation, and even some of my favorite
Dark Tranquillity songs sound tired and, well, uh, just
empty. Albums like
Be’lakor’s
Stone’s Reach or
Intestine Baalism’s
Ultimate Instinct don’t come along often enough these days, as many of you are well aware, and while I may find something interesting on the RYM charts in the >3.50 average user range every now and then, I’m really starting to think that I’m just splitting hairs and coming up with little in my search through the melodic death metal subgenre.
Darkest Hour’s
Deliver Us still rapes all kinds of ass, though. Thank God.
I guess here’s a little something to keep me searching for descent melodic death metal, at least every now and then anyway: Harasai’s
The I–Conception. Like, I’m not trying to take shots at boring bands or albums in the subgenre -- I mean, it already reads in the review like I have, though, I know (sorry, Magnus). But, you know, there is a certain drive and sound that I want from this kind of music. If you don’t like the kind of melodic death metal that I do, and if
In Flames or
Mors Principium Est is your type of thing, then that’s cool; it was mine for a while, too. Harasai just deliver for me what I like in the subgenre, currently anyway. Actually, they take many of the things like that I like from my favorite melodic death bands and put them together rather well for one hell of a debut album.
To start, you have that progressive element thing in the music that
Be’lakor and
Insomnium like to do in their albums on
The I-Conception, with the occasional acoustic interludes and building song structures, good sh
it. And speaking of
Insomnium, you’ve got some of those cool high-fret, catchy riff things that the Ville guitarists for that band like to use a lot, too (though here it’s not quite as prevalent). On another front, something that I immediately detect in my melodic death metal is the power and annoyance level of the band’s vocalist; Harasia’s Martin Wittsieker has a great tone on this album, just what I need for
The I–Conception to not be annoying and stretch my nerves as I listen to it.
If anything, though, the album’s actually really excellent, and that’s not just on the vocal side of things. The quality is consistent on most fronts. Like for instance,
The I–Conception’s production values are strong and loud, yet there is a level of mud and grit to them, too -- it’s very organic and meaty, strong and authentic. Guitarists Yannick Becker and Henrick Tschierschky (Jesus, had to check the spelling of his last name ten times) play a mid-to fast tempo, with the
Insomnium-like guitar leads mentioned earlier and a stockhouse-load of catchy, strong riffs; and drummer Nickolas Becker is more than apt for the job, too, following the lead of the two guitarists, switching tempos and time signatures if needed.
You could knock Harasia for being derivative from, well, almost all of the bands that I compared them to in the review -- and to be honest, they are. But that’s what I like about them and their debut,
The I–Conception. They take what I like to hear from modern melodic death metal, and they deliver it in one package. Is the music as good as that of those from who they derive their sound? Debatable, probably not -- but damn it’s still pretty great, excellent even. My hats off to
Barren Earth and Harasia for giving me some more faith in this subgenre this year. I’ll doubt that another good melodic death metal album will come along before 2010 is over, but hey, at least I have albums like
The I-Conception to hold me over until the next one arrives in the future, whenever that may be, dammit.
