Review Summary: An ambitious but ultimately underwhelming experience
Black metal is a truly fascinating genre. Whether or not you’re a fan is irrelevant; there’s no denying that some of the most powerful and innovative metal of the 21st century has emerged from a style that was originally conceived as little more than anti-music. We’ve had everything from brutal murders, to corpse paint, to pink album covers, to the sh
ittiest production imaginable, to rumours of a musician cutting off his hands and attaching pig trotters to the ends! Hell, for a genre where all these things are possible it’s even had a surprising level of acceptance by the mainstream in recent years.
With that said, there are still thousands of modern acts who prefer to simply pay homage to the most prominent groups of the second-wave of black metal, with that original sound and ethos still intact. Unfathomed of Abyss finds itself closer to this end of the scale. Clearly inspired by Emperor and Summoning but also boasting a frightening apocalyptic atmosphere and eerie atonal riffs to go along with it, Unfathomed of Abyss is the project of Texas native, Kevin Price. The debut album,
Arisen Upon Oblivion, takes you on a journey through desolate, post-apocalyptic lands and the cosmos, with the heavily layered polyphonic music representing the nature of the universe.
The one thing that is absolutely clear from the opening 14-minute behemoth “To Unequal the Balance of the Cosmos” is that this is not an album where you’ll be picking out your favourite individual tracks.
Arisen Upon Oblivion is intended to be experienced as a whole, with its massive concept and sound being pretty overwhelming on first listen. In fact, depending on how you look at it, this is both a negative and positive attribute of the album – the songs blur into each other so much that they may as well have been conceived as a single, 57-minute track. They generally follow a similar pattern regardless of their length, with fast and heavy black metal passages complemented by quieter symphonic ones across the board.
While this is definitely something that will appeal to fans of the genre, the album does tend to lose a bit of its magic as it wears on. Unfathomed of Abyss does not create the most evil-sounding black metal, nor the most original or captivating. Unfortunately the ambitions of the project’s creator far exceed those of his capabilities and the end result is an experience that is worthwhile but not exceptional. There is little here for the average black metal fan not to like but it is this inoffensiveness that proves to be the album’s undoing. Outside of a few exciting riffs (some of which resemble early Meshuggah and Gorguts) and symphonic sections, this is fairly run-of-the-mill atmospheric/symphonic black metal.
With that said, Price’s only real flaw is that he tries too hard – a common mistake among new acts in the ever-evolving world of black metal. The end result is an enjoyable but unspectacular experience, one that holds its own amongst the bedroom bands of the 21st century but not one that will be remembered for years to come.
