(In advance of their recent North American tour with Vltimas and Ex Deo, the Greek band SepticFlesh released an EP named Amphibians, and our DGR gives it a review here.)
If you’ve been following the news around tours for the past five or so years you’ve likely noticed an increasing trend of groups surprise-releasing singles – sometimes collaborative ones, which are immense fun – or EPs just prior to the tour happening. Aborted did it for their most recent tour; Machine Head did a combo song with the vocalists of Unearth, In Flames, and Lacuna Coil making appearances; and Lamb of God combined forces with Mastodon for their full album playthrough tour not too long ago.
The genesis of these songs can often lay in the cutting room floor from previous album sessions since creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum and are highly unpredictable, but whereas it felt like groups constantly needed to have something to get them out on the road, now it has morphed into something more akin to revitalizing the current album cycle for a few more rotations around the sun.
Just as equally though, you do get lucky and a band will find time to sneak into the studio for a few and crank out ideas that’ve been haunting them like shadows ever-present in the corner of their vision. Bearing in mind that SepticFlesh‘s newest release crashes ashore a bit over two and a half years after their album, it would be hard to guess what led to which.
For the completionist dorks like yours truly, these releases are much appreciated because even though a particular tour may be skipping over your podunk town in the middle of the state in favor of the bigger city about two hours’ drive away, you’re still getting more music from a project you enjoy out of the deal. SepticFlesh‘s newest EP Amphibians is such a release, containing two songs – the titular “Amphibians” and “The Experiment” – and two of the purely orchestral compositions that the group often chops up and splices into either one song or uses those elements across three or four.
The two full-band singles within the new Amphibians EP run of a similar vein, like two approaches to the big and burly sound that was the lit neon sign which highlighted much of their Modern Primitive release. The SepticFlesh formula as of recent has been constructed around large-sounding songs like this; big heavyweight numbers that are so groove-focused that it’s easy to imagine them as an army of wrestlers marching their way forward.
The high-speed, high-tempo adrenaline rushes that SepticFlesh are particularly good at – and surprisingly the ones where the orchestral element has to take a bit of a back seat – have become more scattered among numbers like what makes up Amphibians, so the true battle of armageddon style blastfests will have to be satisified waiting in the wings for a little longer. Instead, Amphibians offers up that aforementioned hefty-chug, with the backing symphony and choir that intertwines their way throughout the music doing about eighty-percent of the melodic heavy lifting.
SepticFlesh do still break out their own haunted clean singing within the titular “Amphibians” proper, but these are songs mostly constructed around lumbering rhythms and monstrous roars. “The Experiment” running on a parallel track next to “Amphibians” makes the two into an interesting pairing, giving the main-band ‘focused’ songs the feel of being a much more epic number. The two complete orchestral numbers that are paired alongside the two full-band compositions here tease at that a little bit, with one obviously being the main backing for the actual “The Experiment” song and the other having been offered up as sacrifice for a few other SepticFlesh tracks.
They’re not using every part of the buffalo here, and both “History Repeats Itself” and “The Experiment” do have elements you wouldn’t otherwise notice among the larger gravel-churning of SepticFlesh‘s overall sound. But it also takes a much more trained ear to truly note all the subtleties that are hidden within the much broader strokes of each song. Mostly, they’re crashing rhythmic numbers with large horns punctuating each step of the song, so you can see how subtext gets washed away rather quickly in favor of using a bullhorn for everything. If you have to compete with amps louder than a jet engine and a vocalist who sounds like a monster truck on his own, sometimes the quiter wind instruments get the shaft and the stringed crew have to stay in the high notes just to cut over the low-end frequencies.
If you’re the type who has appreciated that SepticFlesh have included the separate symphonic works as either bonus tracks – or seperate EPs ala 2023’s Reconstruction – then the two closing numbers here will have equal allure. For us barely-evolved apes, it will likely be the first two Earth rumblers and then a closing out before the pretty parts of the symphonic bits actually make us have any sort of basic emotion outside of ‘smash wall’.
SepticFlesh don’t reinvent the wheel here but as a bonus they’re also not in full recycling mode either; this is just the band firmly within their comfort zone. It’d be interesting to hear about the roots of these songs and where they arose from, because instead of this being one of those EPs wherein there are teases and experiments of the future, it operates more as a bonus chapter to SepticFlesh‘s Modern Primitive artistic arc from 2022.
Would it have been fun to see what SepticFlesh might be spying for future runs? Absolutely. But you do have to admit, the future being equally shrouded in mystery is just as fun and you would hope that there’s something gnawing at them for their next full-length, lest we wind up taking a third trip down well-trod paths with SepticFlesh again.
https://septicflesh.bandcamp.com/album/amphibians
http://www.facebook.com/septicfleshband