A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE, PART I: BETWEEN REALMS, LAMENTARI, TRAIL OF TEARS, AS THE SUN FALLS

(DGR is attempting to clear out a backlog of reviews he has been planning for some time, beginning today with a collection of writings for four bands who released records in May of this year.)

You could probably set your watch by this – right down to the opening sentence even – but it seems once again that the back half of the year has crept up faster than one might expect, which means it is now time for the honoured tradition known as ‘clearing the slate’.

These are quicker, more stream of consciousness reviews than I generally prefer to do, and although the brevity is certainly appreciated, it does still kind of bother me personally that I’m not quite diving as deep into an album as I would generally like to.

This may come as shocking but even though I’ve had extended periods of radio silence on the site throughout the years, that doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily stopped listening to music. Instead, the musical net behind the good ship DGR remains constantly deployed, and full, even after I’ve removed and returned any protected species to the their homes in the wild.

What you see here are albums that’ve slowly built up in the collection over the year, some recent and others very clearly and assuredly not so recent. Some of these are even releases that I intended to write about before fucking off for the entirety of May, when I jammed out something like eleven or twelve reviews so the site wouldn’t go completely dark while we were all out in the wild that is both Terror Fest and Deathfest.

Either way, if I don’t at least attempt to kick this boulder downhill, the act of leaving so many releases I’ve been listening to without at least something to help get them to a wider audience is going to bother me until December… when I’ll be doing this again during year-end list season.

 

 

Between Realms – From Boundless Black

Admittedly, there are a handful of musicians I follow from project to project over the years because I’ve felt they didn’t get quite enough notice for the amount of talent they maintain. Granted, quite a few of them have at one point or another played in just about every group in the wider Sacramento-based metal scene, including the group Alterbeast, as the Unique Leader tech-death musical blender of the 2010s both signed, parted out, and shuffled up many of the groups over the years.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that their presence within a somewhat larger label’s lineup meant that they were finally noticeable. Many of them were worthy follows in earlier, embryonic projects or ones that did manage to get off the ground for a period of time – with an eleven-plus year archive of my personal brainrot penned up here, you could easily find me fan’dumbing’ out over many of these musicians.

One of those musicians has been vocalist Monte Bernard, who has been something of a staple among groups out of this neck of California for a while now. The guy is an impressive force to both listen to and witness live and it wasn’t shocking that he kept getting picked up by bigger groups to take over on a live front. In more recent years, he’s also been fairly prolific with three separate projects placing him behind the microphone, with newer project Emberthrone putting out an EP last year, scene-luminaries Bleed The Sky recruiting him as well, and the subject of today’s missive – Between Realms.

From Boundless Black – the debut EP by the Between Realms crew – has been a long time coming, as their social media presence betrays an existence dating all the way back to 2013 in some form or another. The Between Realms group that exists here is a completely different form than what existed back then, to the point that as historically amusing as it is to see posts from eleven-plus years ago about shows they were on, they may as well be treated as a new group.

That being the case, it does help explain much of what is happening within the bounds of From Boundless Black and its six songs. The group’s debut EP offers around twenty-three-and-a-half minutes worth of music, heavily trenched in the amorphous realm of deathcore, tech-death, and death metal stylings that have long mixed into one long-simmering and blastbeat-happy stew. If nothing else, a style proven reliable for the songs that fall into either the riff-avalanche or rhythm-bulldozer camp of music. It’s comforting in a way, when you can guess by logo, album art, and album title what you’ll likely be in for, and with all cards placed on the table from point-zero you can throw pretense out the window and get right to the red meat contained within.

There is a sense throughout From Boundless Black‘s six-song runtime that there are a few creative forces at play. Like many debut EPs from new projects, there is a feeling of the band trying out many ideas available to them to see what really works. No solid throughline between the songs other than the main genre-blueprint, but different approaches to each one. Thus, From Boundless Black‘s pacing is a little start and stop, hammering from a quicker-paced song to a heavy-groover and then back again for a couple of rounds.

One thing that is assured is that the band are leaning heavily on the brutality lever when it comes to their music. It may seem like we’re being flippant when we describe a song as existing somewhere between bulldozer and cliffside collapse but that’s often the proverbial gravel pit that Between Realms elect to play in.

Between Realms does have a bit of the air of ‘proof of concept’ work happening on this first EP – as mentioned above, with the band’s songwriting style vacillating between moods given each song change – but they do manage to dodge the pit of losing a listener’s attention and keep things fairly trim. Six songs at twenty-three some odd minutes betrays this but most of the music here sits comfortably between the three- and four-minute range, save for the indulgent “Sworn To Secrecy” daring to ask five minutes of you after the band have already streamrolled their way through one city block with opener “Blood Of The Breaking Wheel”.

It would be tempting for Between Realms to morph themselves into the whirling dervish of death metal that much of the current musical landscape requires, but that doesn’t happen in From Boundless Black. Between Realms choose a gear early on in a song and stick pretty rigidly to it – part of that loaning itself to the lurching atmosphere of the EP described above – so if a song starts out as a wall-punching bruiser, it is going to end as a wall-punching bruiser.

From Boundless Black was released at the tail-end of May and so proved to be a pleasant surprise when arriving back home as a weary traveler. It may only be partially true that the delay in actually writing something about it comes down to the fact that the initial head-tearing yells of the album were enough to blow one’s hair back for a few months. Between Realms have a core of solid ideas spread out throughout this EP and it has achieved what one could hope to accomplish in laying out much of the foundational work of the band’s sound. Like many of these releases, it will prove itself very interesting to watch and see which seeds planted in this musical demolition derby Between Realms will decide to let grow and expand upon.

The nexus of their style of music has long shown itself to be very crowded with festival posters and band logos crammed together enough to resemble the famous Shinjuku scramble. Between Realms have a strong spark of potential to shine within that pack, as proven by the pit-erupting songwriting style of From Boundless Black, but potential would be nothing if the music provided before weren’t already immense and solid as a mountainside.

https://open.spotify.com/album/3gegcOB2UqhEnj5rILI59G
https://www.facebook.com/p/Between-Realms-100063884260352/

 

 

Lamentari – Ex Umbra In Lucem

While we continue to tumble and bloody ourselves falling down the endless pit that was the last week of May releases – in all seriousness the musical dragnet was overstuffed enough that I was even checking to make sure I hadn’t caught actual marine wildlife – we barrel into the living room mid-ritual of Denmark’s Lamentari and their album Ex Umbra In Lucem.

There seems to be something of an archetypal black metal band that has developed over the past fifteen years or so, one less interested in full-bore tribute and influence-worship for their forebears and one more attracted to the art, dramatis personae, and spectacle that the black metal genre lends itself to. Coupled with keyboards, symphonic backings, and choirs, seasoned to taste with purple and blue lighting, and you can see how many of these groups have found it irresistible to play the part of musical madmen fueled by delusions of grandeur.

Lamentari are the latest vanguards of the style, launching into a wholly ambitious first album – the career prelude prior to this consisting of a series of three EPs – with the sort of joyful abandon that makes it clear they already have a pretty clear and defined musical goal, and thus the quest now is to grab the listener and drag them along for the ride for Ex Umbra In Lucem as well.

With Lamentari, we traverse a completely different sonic landscape than the one presented in the prior Between Realms EP reeview. Lamentari’s album may only weigh in at eight songs – with two instrumentals, even – but the runtime soars well into the thirty-eight minute range. Of course, much of that is credit to the group’s longer-form songwriting style, absorbed from their chosen musical genre, and when your aim is to be big enough that the group’s theatricality is sensed just through a set of headphones, then you’ll find that the songs are a little burlier to afford them room to move.

Lamentari‘s particular style tends to always find a home with yours truly since musically the traversing of multiple musical worlds and fusing them into a grander beast holds more appeal than the single-minded ‘arrow shot’ throughline style of music. Lamentari use a variety of tools available to them as they consistently perform the ‘reaching out’ act of grabbing everything that wanders by into their particular symphonic and melodic black metal hybridization. While it may not all work amazingly, at the very least it is consistent and allows Lamentari to easily grasp onto a sphere that otherwise includes the likes of bands such as Night Crowned, Darkend, Zornheym, and Frozen Gate.

One of the more notable things with Lamentari‘s newest release is just how much the lead guitar actually dominates over the first few songs. In the three-way battle being waged between symphonic bombast, the group’s snarling vocalist, and the guitar, the lead guitar for all its melodies and solos wins out in the first few rounds on the album.

After the requisite cinema-worthy orchestral opening, the first three songs are all densely packed and lead-melody-heavy works. They pick, pull, pilfer skillfully, and joyfully play with plenty of the black metal standards to fill in the time, but the aims of the Lamentari crew are wider in scope, and with an average of five-to-six minutes per song – save for the three-movement epic in “Dolorum Memori” clocking over seven – it won’t shock to hear that Lamentari are also wrapping plenty of melodeath standards within their tendrils as well. There’s even a wandering, near-tech-death and First Fragment-worthy bass solo ensconced within this first pack of songs.

“Appugno” midway through the album’s run is the first real screeching from the belfry, death of a snare drum, style blaster of a song. Lining up well with what the band had been doing up until that point within the album, perhaps “Appugno” was the time wherein Lamentari decided to go from vast and wide in terms of ambition to single-minded, surgical, and sharp. It’s also a much needed adrenaline kick, as Ex Umbra In Lucem does start to have airs of dragging a bit; for as much as Lamentari throw the listener’s way through songs like “Tenebrae” and “Intra Muros Mentis”, they keep a fairly solid pacing and the dynamics of the first three songs tend to fall more in the world of ‘enough thrown your way so as to normalize extremity’. Broken out, there’s been much to discover within that surprisingly-packed sixteen minutes of music but “Appugno” and its ratcheted intenstiy arrives at the correct time to jolt people back out of their comfort zone for a few.

Lamentari do give in to influence worship a bit on the final song, “Arcanum Ignis Animae”. After a mournful string-section-heavy interlude prior to it, Lamentari morph themselves into a form Dimmu Borgir have rarely resembled in recent years — full guitar and drum gallop with enough bellowing orchestration behind it that you’ll feel as if the band have grabbed you and thrown you back in time for a bit. As “Arcanum” continues onward, it chameleons its way back into sounding like its earlier siblings on the album but it’s one of the few times on Ex Umbra In Lucem where the veil is ripped off with enough violence to even stun the modern day UFC watcher.

Lamentari’s previous release history has shown a need, want, and willingness to experiment both in song form and how ambitious they can truly be. Whether aiming for grand epics or compact – by their standards – five-minute ragers, it makes sense that Ex Umbra In Lucem would likely place itself well in the world of ‘all ideas expanded as best we could’. It’s difficult to not continue to circle back around constantly to the fact that for thirty-eight minutes Ex Umbra In Lucem is a massive missive of music. These are big songs, written to be wildly expansive, and for the most part Lamentari do a commendable job of trying to fill all of the metaphorical empty room that they’ve purchased for themselves before the start of each track.

Ex Umbra In Lucem has aims to be cinematic spectacle and for a first full-length – after three EPs and a single’s worth of practice – the shrouded group from Denmark are most of the way there. Time can, and often does, afford a group the ability to forge and hone themselves into a much sharper musical sword and Lamentari have plenty of steel to choose from with the material here, with an album that is enjoyably intense but does promise that the band are still working toward something grander.

https://cult-of-lamentari.bandcamp.com/album/ex-umbra-in-lucem
https://www.facebook.com/lamentari/

 

 

Trail Of Tears – Winds Of Disdain

I’d like to joke that this review is going to be a series of firsts for this website, much as I’m prone to immolating any sense that we might strictly be targeted as one of the ‘heavier’ musical sites around, but that would be a lie as this isn’t even the first time I’ve raised the spectre of the symphonic goth-metal group Trail Of Tears within these very walls.

Trail Of Tears – beginning with Free Fall Into Fear in ye’ olden times – were a formative group for me, striking a rare balance between immense heaviness, massive clean-sung passages, and enough brutality to keep things on the fairly heavy side. Throughout the years, Trail Of Tears‘ lineups saw immense change and even a shift in sound as the clean singing gave way to a more common and expected male and female interchange. I’m on record on this very site as enjoying everything the group have done – yes, even the rockier years surrounding Oscillation and their eventual band hiatus – but the career-pairing of Existenia and Bloodstained Endurance made for such a one-two punch over the years that to this day I still can’t help but keep fawning for the return of the band in some form.

Which has made the return of Trail of Tears all the more exciting and interesting. Long teased and hinted at – seriously, the band seemed to be ready to hit the ground running right up until the worldwide pandemic slammed the brakes on everything – Trail Of Tears returned with a revitalized lineup, largely consisting of a combination of crew that the band had comprised up until they drew the curtains on the group for a decade — older hat from the first somewhat dramatic lineup change in Trail Of Tears‘ history, some new blood on the guitars, and a new female vocalist in the form of ex-Sirenia singer Ailyn.

The end of May saw the band release their first new material as well, finally unleashing the long spoken Winds Of Disdain EP, a four-song release with four very different approaches to the Trail of Tears sound, ranging from a more modernized take to the classic ethereal singer descending from the heavens, to something more akin to the what Trail Of Tears were producing right up until they hit the lights back in 2014. Winds Of Disdain is an intriguing first foot forwards in that respect. It is four very different songs and four potential pathways down which Trail Of Tears can launch themselves headlong should this release prove to be the spark they need.

By virtue of there being only four songs here – and neatly wrapping up at about seventeen and a half minutes even – it would feel a little disingenuous to deep-dive into each one, as the odds that you’d finish the EP multiple times before making it through an in-depth muckraking like that are stratospherically high. One of the interesting patterns that did develop with Winds Of Disdain, though, is that it seemed like the group got more cohesive as the EP moved on.

“Winds Of Disdain” is weirdly tentative, a solid proof-of-existence track but one that has Trail Of Tears hitting checkpoints to prove they’ve still got it before leaning into music equally more ferocious and more gorgeous. “Take These Tears” is more compacted and dramatic by comparison but also has some fun synthesis with the vocal work and even continues some of its surprises into “No Colours Left” following. “Blood Red Halo” on the other hand is the song worth the price of admission, equal parts brutal slugger – yes, even down to some chugging guitar riff work for a bit – and fun madness experiment on the vocal front.

“Blood Red Halo” is one where both of the band’s vocalists stand on equal footing and dance into and out of each other’s orbit for the course of the song. While I often caution that following my advice is a great way to land yourself on the soup line with your musical career, I’d certainly appreciate it if the Trail Of Tears crew decided to follow the routes that songs like “Blood Red Halo” and “Take These Tears” have charted before them.

In a lot of ways the sheer existence of Winds Of Disdain is exciting. Yes, it’s because I personally am one of a collective that left a small candle burning in hopes that they’d never completely closed the books on the band, but also because Trail Of Tears do pick up pretty close to where they left off. There’s promising material on Winds Of Disdain and plenty of room for the music to be blown out into something much greater. It seems like the band have been able to hold together pretty steadily, even weathering the storm of a the initial early start of the band’s reunion only to get bungee-snapped back into the starting block. Part of the adventure with this one is going to be seeing what Trail Of Tears considers their musical comfort zone after this and what, if given the chance, a full length release eventually morphs itself into.

https://trailoftearsthecirclemusicfamily.bandcamp.com/album/winds-of-disdain
https://www.facebook.com/trailoftearsofficial/

 

 

As The Sun Falls – Kaamos

For the past two months or so we’ve been in what I call this part of California’s ‘too fucking hot’ season. The dick-measuring contest that comes with comparing actual temperatures gets clotheslined into a ditch by the side of the road and the description for ‘what’s the weather supposed to be like today?’ has an answer that is most always ‘hot’.

You spend months praying to whatever outside force will listen that your AC doesn’t shit the bed and then hide in your room all day in front of a fan on high speed if you haven’t already ascended and just purchased a full blown air mover. Needless to say, I spend much of that time longing for something colder and even though I live in a valley that doesn’t see snow, boy howdy does that idea seem nice around this time of year.

Luckily, I had snapped up melodeath group As The Sun Falls and their album Kaamos – which saw release in early May – just before I proceeded to hop on a plane and fuck off to two festivals for the better part of a month. This is one I’d been meaning to write about for some time and was almost panicked trying to come up with something right before I left my house that day, because I do love some lead-guitar-inflected melodeath, focused on frozen soundscapes and catchy riffs, and As The Sun Falls scrape so incredibly close to that feeling on Kaamos that I couldn’t help but be drawn to their periphery.

As The Sun Falls tread in familiar waters with Kaamos. Having formed in 2020, it marks only the second full-length for the Swiss/Finnish combination group. Coupled with three EPs and a live recording and you can see how even in four years the band have already been hard at work honing their craft. A craft that would likely see the more doom-oriented crew drawing hefty comparisons to groups like Insomnium and Omnium Gatherum for sure, but one that is also of the class where the band are students of a particular style and are moving ever-closer to fully replicating the genre-blueprint they started with.

As The Sun Falls serve up over an hour’s worth of music on Kaamos and traverse enough frost-covered ground within that time that they would be considered an ice-skating marathon in other terms. If a band were to ever be described as clawing their way uphill into the same sphere as the more tenured groups mentioned above, you could give that descriptor to As The Sun Falls and their Kaamos release.

Songs like “Among The Stars”, “Black Lakes”, “The Great Cold”, and “Aurora” are all vanguards of the style, ranging from the quicker assault to the much more contemplative and mid-tempo stomp that slows a group down and makes the song lengths extend out to five minutes plus. Vocalist Joni Hakulinen has a brawny-bellow on the microphone, with plenty of songs wherein he’s the real low-end rumbler of the band while the stringed-squadron paints a more crystalline landscape and the drummer pulls back in order to keep the machine moving.

“Aurora” and “Among The Stars” were both released in advance of the album, so there is a chance some of you might be familiar with those two songs already. “Aurora” serves to shock the listener awake and keep things moving quickly within the context of Kaamos. It follows a massive epic of a song called “The Wanderer” – which at eight-minutes-plus gives the band plenty of time to both chart their own sonic territory and engage in a little influence worship. A healthy number of the songs on Kaamos tend to pick one lane and stick to it, yet “Wanderer” is one of a few that could be described as having actual ‘movements’ within it. The other two of those being the two with guest singers — “Through Sorrow And Grief” and “Into The Shadows” — as their format naturally lends the band the ability to step out of the limelight a little and write toward each built-up moment wherein singers Gogo Melone and Kari Olli – respectively – float into the musical fray.

Kaamos is a beefy album whose main strengths lie in two opposite directions. That hour descriptor is no joke but the journey of it has been one that I’ve undertaken quite a few times since its release. Granted, that long runtime has meant I’ve split the album in half more than once – usually using the aforementioned “Wanderer” as a halfway marker – but Kaamos is an album that lines up pretty well alongside its snowier compatriots. Maybe a few inches back from the main line, but As The Sun Falls are scraping so close that were they to extend a finger they’d probably at least tap a finish line. Right now, As The Sun Falls are – like a lot of groups that tend to draw me in – very strong off the starting block but hold a tremendous amount of potential with future releases.

The group’s sophomore full-length contains a bevy of good-to-great music within it and they already have an impressively strong knack for atmospherics. There’s certainly fat to be trimmed within the release but that also comes from a hope that As The Sun Falls see how strong they are when they pick up the pace a bit as well. That’s a riddle for As The Sun Falls to unravel, though, as they’re equally as strong with the quicker melodeath numbers as they are when they write the grander, multi-movement, epic-length songs. The future may be a joyful puzzle box for As The Sun Falls in the aftermath of Kaamos, but for listeners now it’s a solid hour’s worth of snowdrift and frozen lake inspired melodeath.

https://asthesunfalls.bandcamp.com/album/kaamos
https://www.facebook.com/asthesunfalls/