Review Summary: Umbra Vitae's sophomore album realizes the potential of the debut.
Umbra Vitae’s sophomore album
Light of Death immediately grabs your attention and does not let go through its 45-minute runtime. Featuring a group of veteran musicians from the heavy music world - Jacob Bannon (Converge) on vocals, Mike McKenzie and Greg Weeks (The Red Chord) on guitar and bass respectively, Sean Martin (Twitching Tongues) on guitar, and Jon Rice (ex-Job for a Cowboy) on drums - the band brings together old school death metal, deathcore and grind worship with a potpourri of influences, resulting in an album that is not only vicious and abrasive but also has its fair share of hooks, dynamics, and - surprisingly - fun, in its own, chaotic-yet-controlled sort of way.
While their 2020 debut
Shadow of Life's 26-minute assault of hardcore-suffused death metal was a prime example of “it is what it says on the tin”, it also felt, perhaps, a tad undercooked. Not so here.
Light of Death feels energized and improves upon the debut in every way while broadening the band's sonic palette, from album highlight Velvet Black's moody post-rock and, well, velvety clean singing, to quiet acoustic guitar followed by oppressive doom on Cause & Effect, to guitar solos on tracks such as Anti-Spirit Machine and Nature vs. Nurture. The record also does not shy away from having a number of quite discordant moments dotted throughout - be it walls of tremolo picking and blast beats, Bannon roaring his lungs out over start-and-stop guitar chords, or the avant-garde horn-blaring and string scratching that appears at the beginning and end of the album, softened up and made digestible by the vocal and riff hooks aplenty which surround them. If you felt lukewarm about the debut,
Light of Death is still well worth checking out.
Another highlight is a fabulously vicious vocal performance by Bannon, who is in fine form here. Whereas on the debut, the vocals had a somewhat muffled and distorted quality - “like a low-quality radio transmission and someone is very upset” as one reviewer put it - on
Light of Death, the throat-ripping quality of Bannon’s vocals is recorded in a pleasantly crisp manner. The guitar tone has been given a similar treatment, the debut’s granite grit having been sharpened with a nasty, razor-like cut.
These positives aside, the album could perhaps have been tightened up by trimming some fat, reordering the material slightly, and/or dropping a song. Considering the quality of execution throughout, though, this is ultimately a matter of listener preference. In this reviewer's opinion, the final four-track stretch of the album is somewhat weaker than the rest, and where
Shadow of Life’s closing title track was the album highlight,
Light of Death’s counterpart does not particularly stand out in the tracklist. Make no mistake though, these issues are minor and do little to harm the fact that this is a killer record that you’d do well to check out if you are a fan of heavy music.
