Review Summary: Modern melodic death metal for the ages
Ahead of Orbit Culture’s sixth full length due in October, let’s take a minute to look back at their breakout album, the mighty “Rasen”. It’s an album that for me has stood the test of time and is one of the many keepers from the loaded year that was 2016.
Casting my mind back to its hook and I can attest that it’s not often that a video for a song is the circuit breaker to initiate an interest in a band but this was one such case.
It took only a minute of “Sun of All” to inject a new brand of savagery in my veins, a substance I didn’t know existed. An ultra modern death metal variant, equal parts groove and precision with one hell of a breakdown and late switch up of vocal styles. Also crucial to my tastes, it sat heavy with sinister synths and was offered up with razor sharp mixing. A perfect metal song.
The album proper is a grand expansion on “Sun of All”, a true representation of the potential of the single. From the get-go the record wastes no time in showing all its wares with opener “Svartport” featuring intricate riffing, the dichotomy of vocals and mid-point change up. These are all favourable musical traits for this listener as it all contributes to variety within songs and constant engagement.
There’s an obvious Hetfieldism to vocalist, songwriter and rhythm guitarist Niklas Karlsson’s voice, but that’s not a knock, it’s a naturally powerful rasp that gives this dense music a sheen and an accessibility. Title track “Rasen” and “The Haste to the Pyre” delve deeper into Orbit Culture’s atmospheric side, a Swedish instinct of long lineage, a mindset shared by fellow countrymen In Mourning.
The galloping “Wings of Dragons” sees the band employ combinations of blackened tremolos and groove metal riffing that gives their brand of melodic death a particular depth and edge. And gives this record the edge over their other releases. By tempering their speed a fraction, the intensity is inversely pronounced. Another highlight is found in the following “I, Wolf” demonstrating the catchiness in the cleaner sections, heavy grooves and driving momentum. To put it simply this is dynamic metal in its most pure state. A masterclass of different elements with constant changes in direction reminding me of Be’lakor. But stylistically closer to bands with slight core undertones like Bleed From Within and Sylosis.
Not content with 2D, Orbit Culture conjured a grand soundscape on “Rasen” with a back end orchestral arrangement to give an epic progression to “The Umbilical Cord” and with subtle choral chants in “Dawn of Light”. It was a lightning in the bottle moment for the band who later pushed the music and production to progressively denser extremes in the later records “Nija” and “Descent” but in my view “Rasen” sits as a career high point. No better exemplar could be put up than the closer “In War” which illustrates a final escalation, or better still the single “Sun of All” which is the one above all.
