Review Summary: Riffs summon riffs.
The Greek black metallers have returned with a new album after six long years since the release of their latest EP,
Howling Flames. The band is among the few protractedly enduring, notably melodic Greek black metal bands, however they’ve never been the most productive one in terms of writing albums during their more than three decades-long career. Deviser’s latest is a rather promising modern melodic black metal release, where Matt Hnaras and Nick Christogiannis could fully demonstrate the certain array of influences they managed to wrap into an great black metal album.
When we are speaking about Greek black metal, it’s impossible to resist the associations to the legendary Rotting Christ, and to be fair, in this case it’s not a blasphemous idea, because the effect of the aforementioned band on Deviser’s music is quite apparent in this release. There are notable similarities to Sakis Tolis’ signature style in many of those riffs presented here, and I believe it was an intentional decision. For example, the easily flowing melodic harmonies in the background of “Sky Burial” can be seen as more or less obvious evidences, but the album’s closer, the brilliant earworm “When the Lights Went Out” (
catchiness overload!) sounds absolutely like it was written by Sakis himself. And there are other moments which could also lead our thoughts back to the Rotting Christ discography, for example the occasional lower vocal lines (
plus the accent, I assume?), and also Androniki Skoula’s powerful oriental music-inspired sopranos in “Of Magick”, which feels like a respectful salute to “Cine iubeşte şi lasă” from the infamous
Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy album.
The other most clear case is the connection to modern symphonic black metal records, which also tend to be more melodic centric in their approach but also heavily relying on the presence of synthesizers. This idea is not new in Deviser’s music, however it’s not exactly as dominant as one may assume. Just to help imagine it: think of a modern Dimmu Borgir here, but like, if that’d be mixed with late Dark Funeral. Perhaps that’s the best way to define what to expect. The main point of this theoretical comparison was to illustrate what’s going on in the album’s first few songs, “Death is Life Eternal”, “Cold Comes the Night”, and “Absence of Heaven”. Moreover, at the end of the latter song, an ominous choir steps into the soundscape and shepherds the listener to the album’s very “filler-like” interlude, “Tenebrae” (which sounds like literally every other composition for a forgettable fantasy movie). To be honest, I see this as a sadly big flaw of the first half of the album, because these really “forceful” additions to turn these tracks into epic pieces felt really unnecessary and kitschy to me. Why? Because they don’t couldn’t add more depth to these songs, plus I believe the riffs could carry the album on their own as well, which happen to be the biggest strength of the album as well… and oh boy, these riffs are so good! The guitar tone is sharp and full, the fierce and very creative and balanced guitarwork leaves nothing to desire. You can hear galloping riffs, classic arpeggios, heavy metal inspired melodic harmonies, some truly vivid solos and even some acoustic intros like in “Where Angels Fear to Tread” in
Evil Summons Evil, and from this aspect, the album is extremely well-built.
While the album deploys an insane amount of top quality riffs to the listener,
Evil Summons Evil feels like a rather unbalanced record. I’d say, perhaps they wanted this record to be more than what could have been the optimal, as in my opinion, there was no need for any kind of epic ambience; but at least they counterbalanced it with the involvement of certain guest vocalists (like Heljarmadr from Dark Funeral or Efthimis Karadimas from Nightfall), and of course with an exceptional instrumental performance.
