(Our writer DGR finally made his way to the debut album by the San Fernando Valley melodic death metal band Upon Stone, which was released in January by Century Media Records, and was moved to write about it at length in the following review.)
Upon Stone were a heck of an anomaly when they first appeared in the early part of 2024. Seemingly emerging out of the aether with a full-length album and a professed love for melodeath, it was eyebrow-raising to see the group gaining enough steam to grab headlines in the early part of the year, right about the time everyone is still on their post-end-of-year list collection comedown.
Admittedly, we’re late to the bus on this one. Upon Stone‘s first full-length Dead Mother Moon has been on the back-burner since its mid-January release, mostly waiting for a gap in time when we could truly explore the album’s deepest reaches but also to take a deep glance at why the band might’ve garnered such interest with its melodeath necromancy in the year 2024: a time in which even the old-guard are glancing over the mid to late ’90s era efforts of a lot of those bands in favor of material more in line with music from the mid-aughts.
Upon Stone dash between those two eras over the course of Dead Mother Moon while also bringing in light thrash elements and, yes, even adding the occasional American metal-core spice to the mix because who doesn’t enjoy themselves a solid and punchy guitar beating from time to time?
Our pathway to Upon Stone‘s doorstep was probably more circuitous than most; less the result of a hell of a PR blitz by Century Media -among other suspected reasons, amusing as they are – upon the release of Dead Mother Moon and more of a genuine curiosity. Part of that is actually due to a habit of yours truly here, wherein your author will fall for hours down enough different rabbit holes that OSHA is likely to cite us for not leveling out the writing field.
In reality, we didn’t come across Dead Mother Moon thanks to the opening salvo from the band in the early part of the year. Our arrival was almost by side door, the result of us sitting around and wondering ‘hey, I wonder what the Vaelmyst dorks are up to these days?’. The result was the discovery of Upon Stone, which features Vaelmyst guitarist Ronny alongside drummer Wyatt, and completed by bassist/lead vocalist Xavier and guitarist Gage.
To say the first few spins of Dead Mother Moon upon that discovery were interesting is an understatement, given the gothic overtones and doom-metal strangeness that inflected the Vaelmyst album Secrypts Of The Egochasm back in 2021. Dead Mother Moon by comparison is an adrenaline rush of an album, full of high-speed numbers and a whole lot of love for days gone by – siloing out their own special block of the resurrection of the melodeath sphere and one that is just a few years later in the scene that Majesties adventures in, during the early-part of that genre’s birthing.
Dead Mother Moon moves in two (moon) phases for a total of nine songs. Weirdly enough, it feels a little bit like an EP with an intermission before an epic number and a cover song close things out. It’s weird pacing, for sure. Dead Mother Moon, though, is more a collection of single songs than a major throughline, so pacing issues aside, what you’ll get with Upon Stone‘s full-length are five surgically precise melodeath tracks right up front and then two almost folk-melodeath epics right at the end.
Upon Stone even make this clear by opening up with the title track “Dead Mother Moon” and waste no time getting to the meat of things, setting their music awash (in flames) and keeping things moving quick. The pacing on the first few numbers is near-breathless, with the one real hard-hitting breather happening in the album’s second song “Onyx Through The Heart” – appearing ultra-punchy, and sending one massive blow through the speakers before settling into that song’s solid double-bass roll.
“Onyx Through The Heart” was also one of the earliest songs released before this album, showing that both the band and their label saw the value in it early on as well.
Progressive numbers get pushed to the wayside in favor of songs like “Onyx Through The Heart” for much of Dead Mother Moon; every track at one point or another has a hefty lead-and-groove segment and easily translatable headbanging built within it. “Dusk Sang Fairest” at four songs in is the first real placement of the swaying folk-metal backing to Upon Stone‘s music, which if you’re a longtime melodeath fan you kind of sensed was coming.
What is interesting is that in spite of all of this, you might have the sense that Upon Stone keep things really polished and crystal clean, like melodeath got toward the mid-aughts. Perfect for a plastic and completely white room, keyboards and guitars pristine as a mountain spring. Yet, Upon Stone don’t have that on Dead Mother Moon. Things have their fair share of grit here. They benefit from big label production throughout, yet there’s also a chosen bit of dirt and fire layered upon each song, just enough noise and reverb that the project doesn’t feel like it’s a wall of endless money being thrown at it.
Dead Mother Moon‘s back third also has some intriguing moves as Upon Stone use an even older song – “To Seek And Follow The Call Of Lions” saw a single release in 2022 according to Bandcamp – to construct the framework upon which the album’s final movement is built. The pairing of “To Seek and Follow…” and “The Lantern” are Dead Mother Moon‘s longest songs and the two spring off of a quiet instrumental in the form of “Nocturnalism”.
You’ll know you’ve settled into it when you realize that the opening of “To Seek and Follow…” and its dual guitar leads might’ve just torched the quiet moments that were right before it. Granted, there are a few times within Upon Stone‘s full-length wherein the band launch everything at the word “Go” with zero build-up at all, and “To Seek And Follow…” is the beneficiary of it, given the obvious shock to the system, considering the rest of the song afterward is an expected bulldozing.
“The Lantern” and its more grandiose nature elevates the song beyond just mean-ass-kicker and into full-on composition and one befitting the surprisingly trad-metal ‘knight with sword in front of the moon’ album artwork. “The Lantern” does shift tempos a few times but hews closely to Upon Stone‘s ‘mostly fast, all the time’ groundwork they laid across the rest of the disc.
That extra minute of breathing room gives Upon Stone space to expand a bit and reflect the brutalizing of “To Seek And Follow…” just prior to it. It’s not the heaviest song within the bounds of Dead Mother Moon, but “The Lantern” – and if you’re generous the triplet of “Nocturnalism” and the song prior to it – has the most ‘pyrotechnic spectacle’ to it.
Upon Stone close out Dead Mother Moon with a pretty fun cover of the Misfit‘s “Dig Up Her Bones”. They play it pretty straight, the formula being to ramp up the aggression and allow plenty of room for Xavier‘s harsh yell to fill up the space. Yet it fits in alongside most of Dead Mother Moon as a whole: the song’s roots in punk riffs and sloppier mosh pits translate well into a thrashier number to send the whole album home.
Upon Stone use the last two original songs on Dead Mother Moon to create a somewhat grandiose closing atmosphere – and there’s even an instrumental scene-setter before it – yet when the album closes they shut things down on a raw and quicker number, one last final slap across the forehead to keep you alive. It’s about as ‘fun’ as the album gets, while the rest of Dead Mother Moon prefers to keep its fangs bared.
Dead Mother Moon is terrifyingly solid. There isn’t too much to knock here at all. You could say that it’s a single-minded release but a lot of full-length debuts by bands tend to be that way. They find one solid thing to sink their teeth into and expand from there on following releases. In a lot of ways, that is the feel of Dead Mother Moon. Upon Stone found that one solid thing to wrap their sound around and crushed eight songs and a cover out of it.
Dead Mother Moon is the type of debut that is enjoyable on its own – yours truly is always a sucker for the one-two shin-snapper of a song – but you can see just where Upon Stone might expand and what reaches they could climb their way up to in the future. Strange anomaly that they are, suddenly bursting into the musical universe the way they did, they’ve done plenty to impress with their first full-length.
https://centurymedia.bandcamp.com/album/dead-mother-moon-24-bit-hd-audio
https://www.facebook.com/uponstone