Review Summary: Massive.
Happy accidents are one of life's best little pleasures. Maybe you're late to meet your friends at a movie and end up hitting it off with a girl in line, getting lost on the way somewhere and finding the best restaurant you've ever eaten at, or searching on Spotify for a certain Meshuggah album and discovering there's a band with the same name. Now, lest you think these Swedes (okay, they're both Swedes), who peddle in titanic metal of a decidedly less math-oriented bend, picked their name just in the hopes of capitalizing off of such confusions, Koloss the band has been around since 2007, predating the other Swedes to the name by about five years.
One glance at this album should tell you about all you need to know. The opening title is called "From the Sea (The Birth of a Monster)", the band is named after a race of bestial warriors from the Mistborn series of epic fantasy novels, and the shortest song is still nearly ten minutes long. This is post metal of the "epic" variety, the kind that wants to evoke the feeling of awe one gets staring into a bottomless chasm rather than malaise and darkness. The fear Koloss wants to impart upon the listener is that of staring up at such monsters and realizing one's own insignificance to them, not that of impending death. Minor key and oppressive as these melodies are, melodramatic even, they never sound like a horror story, never depressing, never self-loathing. Heck, it's downright groovy at times.
This is an album that needs to be reviewed on its own merits, realizing that they're not attempting to put speedy riffs in or mix things up with complex time signatures and oddball arrangements. Empower the Monster exists for the simple purpose of bludgeoning the listener with a tsunami of gigantic riffs, thundering drums, and bass guitar that groans like the creatures it inspires images of, all the while the vocalist does his best to stick to your standard post metal qualities. He shouts and howls deep in the mix with the kind of throaty wails that Neurosis and Cult of Luna set down the template for. It's serviceable and never detracts from the music, but it doesn't really add anything either.
These four lengthy tracks all lumber along at roughly the same speed, making the experience a decidedly more hypnotic than dynamic affair. It's an album where the chunky riff and pounding drums of the opener set the stage perfectly, particularly when the bass guitar gets to take center stage with a nice bluesy lick while the guitars step into an ambient role. Unlike many post metal bands, though, who forget that ambience on its own isn't adequate, Koloss makes sure that those guitar lines are just melodic, just catchy enough to get your head bobbing. Better still, the riffs vary up enough that even though each track has its own character, they stay dynamic enough that the album doesn't feel like a four-track EP with way too many measure repeats.
Production means a lot when the music is slow and simplistic. Busy arrangements can get away with lackluster recordings because so much of the attention is on what notes are being played as opposed to how they sound, but an album with a much slower tempo needs each note to sound perfect, and on Empower the Monster everything is spot on. The bass rolls and groans, guitars are crunchy rather than fuzzy, and the drums sound enormous and meaty. It's the kind of album where a single power chord left to rumble is a gripping listen, let alone the heavy arrangements here.
I waffled a bit between a 3.5 and a 4 here chiefly because it depends on one's opinion of this style of metal. By any measure, it is a great album. As a post metal album, it deserves a lot on one of the higher shelfs, a disc that does nothing terribly new but does it with exceptional capability. From the wider scope, though, it's very much entrenched in the style. It won't win any new converts to post metal who couldn't get into other standard bearers, but anyone receptive to its style will have a hard time finding anything with quite this sledgehammer delivery. If you're looking for a slow, steamroller-heavy album to let your skull slowly cave in to, Empower the Monster will scratch that itch with aplomb.
