AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): REPLACIRE — “THE CENTER THAT CANNOT HOLD”

Behind every album there is a tale — of course there is. Sometimes the tales are mundane, but in the case of Replacire‘s new album The Center That Cannot Hold, the story brings to mind the  travails of Sisyphus, that benighted figure from Greek myth whom the gods punished for cheating death by forcing him to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top.

In legend, the fate of Sisyphus is one of eternal toil. but fortunately Replacire did eventually manage to reach the summit and stay there, not only completing this new album but also achieving a new summit in their music.

We’ll give you an excerpt of information about why the completion of the album turned out to be such a struggle, but our main mission today is to present a full stream of the album on the eve before its June 21 release by Season of Mist.

Photo Credit: Hillarie Jason

As fans of Replacire well know, it’s the brainchild of guitarist Eric Alper (indeed, the band is just his name spelled backward), an alumnus of Berklee College of Music, a competitive bodybuilder, and a producer of music for other artists, as well as TV and movies.

Alper first formed Replacire at Berklee with four classmates back in 2009, and by 2012 they had self-released their debut album, The Human Burden, which could be described as hybrid of thrash, prog, and death metal. Eventually that led to tours with the likes of Hate Eternal and Beyond Creation.

All that also eventually led to Replacire‘s signing with Season of Mist, which released their second album Do Not Deviate in 2017. But before they could begin a headlining tour, the band’s lineup completely turned over, and Alper began searching for replacements. He found them, including other Berklee alums and vocalist James Dorton (from Black Crown Initiate and more recently The Faceless), and work resumed on the third album But the boulder rolled back down hill again.

We understand that Replacire don’t work quickly even under the best of circumstances, given a near-fanatical attention to detail, but the advent of the covid pandemic slowed the process even more. To stay afloat, Alper sold the band’s van and moved out of their rehearsal space. As he has said, “Everything that I had built to support the band was falling apart”.

To compound the difficulties, the band’s vocalist James Dorton began suffering from sleep paralysis after witnessing a traumatic event, and Alper was battling his own bouts with anxiety and depression. It seems the recording process was also an intense and grueling experience. Now maybe you begin to understand the album’s title.

Photo Credit: Hillarie Jason

But of course Replacire finished what they started out to do a long seven years ago, and the result is a substantial body of work — an album of 11 songs and more than 43 minutes of music. As we’ve already hinted, the band’s stubborn perseverance and hard toil paid off.

That becomes immediately evident with the album’s opening song, “Bloody Tongued And Screaming“, which might be taken as a metaphor for how the band felt in their most frustrating moments along the path of the album’s creation, but also lyrically seems to be a metaphor for many other struggles in life.

The song immediately hits very damned hard, with a punishing groove, slashing guitar work, and howling and roaring vocals intense enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. But then suddenly it makes a startling change, becoming soft and eerie, with vocals gasping.

That haunting and otherworldly melodic line persists even after the hammering and howling resumes. The notes warp and drift, channeling beleaguered moods. Bursts of frantic fretwork and feverish, needling sensations also add feelings of confusion and torment.

The song’s jolting, start-stop grooves are never less than punishing, to the point of sometimes sounding like the detonation of bunker-busting bombs, and the continual changes in what happens around them (including strangely skittering electronics and lots of other mutating fretwork emanations) become mind-bending — just as the vocals remain mind-mauling in their unhinged intensity.

Photo Credit: Hillarie Jason

And that’s only the start — a pretty heart-pounding and breath-taking start. Across the next 10 songs the band reinforce the impressions left by that opener: Replacire repeatedly prove themselves capable of inflicting ruinous levels of pile-driving and jackhammering destructiveness, but also creating eye-popping technical fireworks, leading listeners into bizarre and sometimes sublimely ethereal netherworld or otherworld dimensions, relentlessly shifting the moods, and bombarding the listener’s brain with blood-letting vocal ferocity.

Surprise is a constant feature of these songs. You never know exactly where they’re going to go, or which of their many morphing motifs (in addition to the pavement-cracking grooves) are going to be the ones that get stuck in your head.

You’ll encounter ruthless bludgeoning one moment, proggy flights of fancy another (especially in the album’s back half), ripping war-charges another, and the hyperactive machinations of some far-flung alien species in yet another. And sometimes it feels like we’re in the midst of some waking hallucination.

Certainly, the juxtaposition of brutish atonal thuggery and surgically precise mad-scientist experimentation is, at a high level, one of the album’s chief hallmarks — along with the juxtaposition of those maniacal screams and voracious growls with bits of chilling and soulful singing here and there. The guitar work is just as likely to be fluid and mellifluous as it is angular and dissonant; the bass lines are just as nimble and unpredictable; and the drumming is as inventively multi-faceted as everything else — and of course damned obliterating too.

You don’t really need to slap a genre label on everything you hear, especially when you really can hear it all. But trying to do that with The Center That Cannot Hold would be a challenge anyway. Is it tech-death? Is it brutal death? Is it prog-death? It’s really all of those things, and lots of other things too (including soloing that sometimes seems influenced by jazz fusion). What it also really is, is an extreme metal spectacle of a high order that’s a non-stop thrill to hear.

We’ll now leave you with the complete album stream, and these words from Eric Alper:

“We poured all of our blood, sweat and tears into this album”, Alper says. “It took years off my life. There were plenty of times where I wanted to quit. But I’m glad we didn’t, because this is our best album. Everything from the overall production down to the lead guitar parts took a step up. The tone is more serious The songs are still techy but they’re also a lot heavier. I’m proud of us”.

REPLACIRE is:
Eric Alper – Guitars
James Dorton – Vocals
Kee Poh Hock – Guitars
Zak Baskin – Bass
Joey Ferretti – Drums

The album was recorded at Ugly Duck Studios, with Alper as producer and sound engineer. It was mixed and mastered by the legendary Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios, and it’s completed with cover art by Andrew Tremblay.

Season of Mist is lavishly releasing the album on digipak CD and three vinyl LP variants, as well as digitally, along with album-related merchandise. You can check out all the offerings via the links below.

ORDER & STREAM:
https://orcd.co/replacirethecenterthatcannotholdpresave

FOLLOW REPLACIRE:
Bandcamp: http://replacire.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Replacire
Instagram: https://instagram.com/replacire