Given the non-stop touring and frequent roster changeup of North Carolina-based death-dealers Glass Casket, not to mention questions of how to progress from their last full-length
We Are Gathered Here Today..., a new album does not conjure up a great deal of promise even from rampant fans of this sort of music, myself included. The way I saw it, there were only so many directions this album could go. For instance, the big song off of their last album was "In Between The Sheets", which in all likelihood was due to the melodic break, reminiscent of their fellow NC act Between The Buried And Me's "Mordecai"; would this album be rife with melodic breaks, the bassist singing, the ideas played out? The last album was also very much its own beast; it was a complete idea and clearly focused, and another album that sounds just like it would simply not work. Or perhaps even the new guitarist Ian Tuten wouldn't live up to expectations, or drummer Blake Richardson and lead guitarist Dustie Warring would be short on new ideas given their extended period with Between The Buried And Me. Even to me, this album seemed like a dead end, and I was cheering for the band to stay together the whole time.
Well, after hearing
Desperate Man's Diary, their new album, I can honestly say that I am beyond pleasantly surprised, because this album surpasses their last quite easily, even though it is a good ten minutes shorter, and casts all my doubts aside. To put it simply, these guys are amazing. This is simply one of the best hybrid metal albums I've heard in years; what little I can find wrong with it is not near enough to warrant not listening to it. Let's start with the negatives then: the first song is pretty but is essentially a lead-in filler track, and the last is a sort of trite spoken word thing (but it's short enough and it's the last track, so it's not a big deal in the slightest). There, that's out of the way. I'll continue and explain what it is that's so great about this album.
This is predominantly death metal/metalcore (deathcore if you'd like to coin an especially annoying term yourself) from a death metal/metalcore act. Both death metal and metalcore have their fair share of unbelievably contrived bands who have nothing to offer the music world. Not Glass Casket. While this album does share the typical traits of "death metal" and "metalcore" on occasion, this really just is metal to the very center; there's grind, technical metal, some weird offbeat yelling passages, hell, there's even stuff I'd dare to call black metal-inspired. Most metal acts wouldn't dare combine all these different metal breeds into one sound, but these guys do it effortlessly all over this record.
The first track lures you in and then you're hit in the face by "Too Scared To Live", the best song on the album hands-down. It is a perfect summation of the album: it starts with death metal note trills, runs into chugging metalcore passages, pounds into doomy sludgy areas, smacks you with some sweeping lines (and tasteful sweeping at that; this isn't a Darkest Hour album), a downright
pretty solo that ends in pure mathiness, and then an utterly massive breakdown atop vocalist Adam Cody's pleading rasps of "Stuck kicking nickels for a dime a dozen a day". It is the perfect introduction to a perfect conglomeration of ideas and effortless genre-switching; this is the song that defines the album by a mile.
Oh, and I mentioned solos. There is a solo in all but the two bookends I mentioned at the start, meaning one in every main song. Is this important? To be honest, I don't care whether a metal act wants to solo in every song (though the wankier acts make me cringe); these solos, however, are all over the map. The solo in the afore-mentioned "Too Scared Too Live" and the one in "Genesis" are really just pretty little things, nothing jaw-dropping but definitely appropriate. The solos in the other songs run the gamut; the one in "Less Like Human" starts out reminding me off Slayer and ends by making me debate whether a computer can devise guitar lines (that's a good thing in this case). There were maybe two solos on
We Are Gathered Here Today... and I didn't mind; here I look forward to hearing them in every song, since they make everything just as eclectic as the shifts from chugging to harmonized trilling and blastbeats.
The roster changeups have done nothing to stem the band's progress, either; every single member amazes you at some point or another. Cody's voice is my idea of the perfect metal screamer/growler: he has incredible range and knows how to make it exactly as effective as it can be at any given moment. Dustie and Ian's strength doesn't lay solely in their ability to shred/sweep but in their amazing versatility; either can harmonize a riff in any number of ways, chug impossible changeups in odd time sigs, play tasteful metal solos, and of course, pound your brains in. Blake is, as always, insane, and any metal act would be immensely proud to implement his skills, Between The Buried And me and Glass Casket included. And Sid Menon outdoes himself not only by playing some
interesting metal bass lines (especially the break in "A Cork Stops The Whining"), but also by not giving into temptation and having another singing break on any of the songs I here. Not that I hate Sid's voice, I like it, but it shows restraint that they don't fall back on a tired formula to make things viable.
So the lesson learned here is that you shouldn't expect anything from a band based on their construction. Despite all the setbacks this band faced, they have triumphed with this record; it has its flaws and is only thirty-odd minutes long and yet still surpasses their last and arguably most other recent metal works in complexity and sheer brutality.
Desperate Man's Diary is decidedly Glass Casket's best yet and should rightfully secure their place as the leaders on the forefront of modern metal. Is that probable, or even possible? At this point, I don't really know what to expect anymore.
