(This is DGR‘s review of the debut album of “Death Pop” by High Parasite, fronted by Aaron Stainthorpe of My Dying Bride, produced by Gregor Mackintosh of Paradise Lost, and released by Candlelight on September 27th.)
There’s an acceptance that comes with the idea that people aren’t required to listen to music the same way you do. You can bang the drum forever about how to experience something but in reality sometimes people just want to be able to throw something on and let it whip past them without a second thought.
The reality of which is perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to be able to fantasy-draft a death metal band together like Nader Sadek does with his releases. Not everyone needs to be able to fold an album over again, and again, and again, such that it eventually resembles a musical and intellectual rolled omelette. This of course being the long walk toward a simple question:
That being, have you ever listened to a release that has caused you to think about it way more than you could possibly justify any reason for? Thinking about it far more than the album might reasonably deserve? Because that may be what’s happening here with High Parasite’s debut album Forever We Burn. An album that has somehow caused the gears to turn here far more than one could intellectually justify.
Context. Context is everything. Context allows one to prognosticate about an album, the future of a career, even have some idea of what you might be in for – if you’re interested in that sort of thing. It helps if you’re risk averse, because as time gets limited on this earth, new albums start to feel like gambles. No wonder why folks seem to lock into their decade or so of ‘known’ music and never wander past that.
Yet High Parasite’s Forever We Burn is an album that contextualizes itself before you even hit the play button – so long as you’ve had a brief rundown of what’s gone into this album’s creation and its sudden appearance.
Forever We Burn is not the most metal thing in existence – it is, for all its stated purposes, a goth-rock album built around arena-worthy riffs and accessibility. You’re not going to be challenged here; every song is purposefully built around a hook large enough that you could hang a grey whale on it.
But weirdly enough, given the people involved in High Parasite‘s creation, this feels like the first time they’ve swung for the fences in that direction this hard in a long time – even if they’re mostly the background actors compared to the faces and main musicians of the band. Which is why High Parasite needs a little explanation, given just how much headline grabbing was done by the presence of one My Dying Bride vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe, almost enough that it somewhat buried the other lede in regards to the band — that High Parasite is an extension of the Greg Mackintosh musical cinematic universe as well.
Much of High Parasite‘s existence has been explained by a very much bemused and “just happy to be here” Aaron in multiple interviews, crediting musician Tombs as having worked on much of High Parasite while he was also working as Greg Mackintosh‘s guitar tech across his multitude of projects. Slowly the two wove into one another and the result is the Paradise Lost/Strigoi/Host guitarist/vocalist/main-driver helping to produce the group’s debut album as well asthe eventual luring of said My Dying Bride vocalist into the whole affair – leading to what we now know as the group’s debut album Forever We Burn.
Which, as mentioned before, is an album that when given a description like that – as well as the extended cast involved – sounds exactly how you might imagine it to sound. It has been ages since a release has come along wherein a base familiarity with a genre could allow you to pinpoint to the letter what an album is going to sound like. Yet Forever We Burn does that, and it is very sincere about that fact as well.
There’s no pretense about what High Parasite are trying to accomplish and they veil absolutely nothing. They make it immensely clear from the get-go what blueprint they’re going to run with on Forever We Burn and they do it with a reckless joy. Yet, knowing all of this and all of the buttons the band are pushing with this release, somehow Forever We Burn still manages to land – which may be why it is constantly causing the gears to turn over and over again.
As an album, it keeps things fairly neat as it hovers around the three and a half minute to four and a half minute range for most of its songs. It only gets truly indulgent once, sailing well into the five minute range like a ship in search of a lighthouse long gone out. Other than that, there’s a sort of surgical precision and expertise on Forever We Burn that could only be applied by people who’ve cut their teeth in their specific genre-scene for some time, and given the aforementioned list of dramatis personae involved here, you could understand how High Parasite stick the landing with ease on that front.
Interestingly though, Forever We Burn is not just a one-vocalist showcase. High Parasite put a lot of foundational work into the idea that there’s going to be two vocalists going at multiple points, often for a high and low interchange or harmonization. In fact, save for the opening yell, Aaron‘s voice is not the first element to take up the spotlight on this release’s title song. That shifts more so throughout the album, suggesting that as High Parasite began to crystalize as a project, the songwriting began to focus more heavily on the personalities now available to it.
You couldn’t fault High Parasite for wanting to put their strongest foot forward, and with an album like Forever We Burn, the three singles that led up to the album (you’ll find them below) are some of the strongest in its lineup and also ones that provide a clear idea of the rest of the release. Save for “My Syndrome” and its brooding verses and straightforward main guitar riff, many of the songs on Forever We Burn are going to fall into one of the three camps presented by its singles.
They’re either going to be in the big power-chorus camp like “Wasn’t Human” – allowing for the group’s vocalist tag team to really ramp up just how much they’re bought into the ideas here – or the main verse of the song existing as the head-crusher in the way that “Let It Fail” does. “Let It Fail” is nursery-rhyme-like in its approach and its lilting verse, so that you only need two sentences to have a grasp of where the melody of the song is going and you could hum along from there. There’s almost no time within that song wherein the main vocal work or guitar lead isn’t following that early established melody, leading to earworm by hypnotism in a sense.
It’s in the longer songs like “Grave Intentions” wherein you’ll have the full glimpse of the My Dying Bride influence within the band, and page after page of written poetry seems to find its way to the microphone. High Parasite knew what they were doing recruiting Aaron into the fold and that maneuver helped them slip past much of the more overwrought dramatism that seemed to infect the early-aughts of the goth-metal scene that wandered out of regions like Finland.
Which lets the band throw a true curveball at the listener at the end of Forever We Burn in “We Break, We Die”. Up until its closer, Forever We Burn is a determined goth-rocker, yet in “We Break, We Die” the band are acknowledging other influences within their musical sphere and building a song around a mostly electronica-driven drumbeat. It’s probably the most modern “sounding” song on the album – and they’re not the only metal group as of recent to work a bunch of electronic drums in the mix – yet it is also a throwback to the days of basement clubs and the near-industrial instrumentation that colored the genre for decades.
Either way, were it not for a project like Host happening way in the outer spheres of the Paradise Lost/My Dying Bride extended musical universe, you certainly wouldn’t have had a song like “We Break, We Die” on the end of year bingo card.
Without a song like that to end the affairs of Forever We Burn, the only way to describe the album would have been to couch it in the aforementioned theory that there has not been an album in some time that has so clearly set forth in pursuit of a specific idea and sound and nailed that style to an absolute “T”. It sounds exactly as you would imagine if it were described to you, save for its somewhat out-of-left-field song at the end.
Who could even fault them for light experimentation like that either, given the number of playgrounds Tombs and his chosen crew of miscreants seem to happily plow their way through in pursuit of wider reach. At times Forever We Burn can feel surgical and calculated, but all the same still manage to embed itself into the memory stem. It is so blatantly appealing to the pleasure points of the brain that you could be snow-blind from a blizzard and still see the aspirations of a disc like this one.
When a band are having fun with terms like “Death-Pop” and “Arena-goth-rock” you tend to reorient your discussion more toward the idea of whether the group have accomplished what they’ve set out to do, more so than greeting it as some life-changing experience or massive event within the metal scene.
That may be why the gears have been turning so much when it came to thinking about Forever We Burn, because one wants to ascribe greater meaning to what is probably not there, and is just too ashamed to admit that an album that has so much fun shamelessly pandering to the pleasure side of the brain has worked its way into one’s system. You’d like to imagine that you’re better than this.
But you’re not. Probably.
https://highparasite.lnk.to/ForeverWeBurn
https://highparasite.com/
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