Review Summary: A very pleasurable and easily listenable album that unfortunately runs a little light on ideas in the latter half - still a blast though.
Hybridizing melodic death metal and black metal is a surprisingly rare combo - popularized by the acclaimed album
Storm of the Light's Bane by
Dissection, one would come to expect that such a satisfying sound would set some trend here, with many imitators to follow - and yet for some reason the scenes to this day seem to so rarely intertwine. Perhaps
Ne Obliviscaris are another - also great - band that comes to mind when you think of such a combination of genres, but they also put a very progressive spin on things, so something more typical is a hard find. Here's where
Outlaw (GER) come to the rescue.
The band's country of origin is a bit hard to pin down - some sources say they come from Brazil, others that they're based in Hamburg, Germany. Regardless, their most recent effort
Reaching Beyond Assiah may just be what you're looking for if you're interested in some melodic death metal with a blackened edge.
The mesmerizing cover art promises something unusual and sure enough - the highly pleasant, satisfying and easily listenable sound this album brings is readily made apparent by the opener track,
Bliss of Soul, which encapsulates perfectly what this album is all about - melancholic melodeath lead melodies interspersed with sorrowful black metal sections, energetic blast beats and venomous, high-pitched riffs. A combination so seamless it really is strange that you don't get to hear it more often. Both bombastic and contemplative at the same time - the high-octane drumming assault ensures the listener is kept on their toes at all times, while allowing them to drift off into contemplation without inducing boredom. It is quite a trick to pull that off with music that is not particularly proggy and relatively straightforward.
There is occasionally some droning and repetitive quality to the tracks that makes most of them clock in at between 6 and 7 minutes, but that doesn't make them drag on - if only for how good the melodies are - this makes the album have an overall leisurely and low-density pace, which can be appealing in its own right. Still, that is expertly counterbalanced by the transitions between slower-drummed sections and the blast sections, which can be quite abrupt and dynamic - while the melodic death metal inspired sections break things up in unexpected ways. That's one of the perks of playing a hybrid genre - as a composer you have many more tools at your disposal, which more puristic composers would probably discard ourtight - as if staying within the confines of an arbitrarily chosen genre was akin to making sure you ticked off only the positions off some rigid checklist, while consciously avoiding anything other than what's found there. Meanwhile, some of the best music ever written had no regard for genre boundaries, and Outlaw definitely demonstrate that merging even two well-defined genres can yield highly satisfying results.
The music is every bit as melancholic, sorrowful and contemplative as you'd expect from the melodeath greats, while aslo adding the black metal edge and raw darkness that few melodeath bands dare incorporate. Both genres are executed in rather textbook ways, which alone makes for something interesting considering that most other bands aiming for a similar sound tend to put a decidedly more proggy spin, to the point of sometimes obfuscating the stylistic origins of the sound. Here instead you have simply a melding of high quality melodic death and melodic black metal - hell, the album sounds like it could have come out in the mid 00s.
There is unfortunately something that holds this outing back from being excellent, at least on the first listen. I'm not sure if it's fatigue (because this particular sound is the opposite of fatigue-inducing), but it does seem like the latter half of the album does fall off a litle bit in terms of idea density, compared to the denser packed first half. This unfortunately has to affect the overall rating, but don't let it deter you from giving this a spin, since even just the bombast of the first four tracks makes it absolutely worth it. Here's hoping htis album goes on to become a foundational effort for something bigger - maybe a fad or a trend, or at the very least something more from this band.
