(In mid-February the Colorado-based metal band Cantu Ignis released their second album, adorned by wondrous undersea cover art by Mark Erskine. DGR came across it and found the music pretty wondrous too, as you’ll see from his review below.)
Much as we would like to pretend that we are cooler than having a schedule or anything resembling a routine, the year in heavy metal has developed a flow to it. Some things you could set your watch by, while others are a bit more nebulous but are still guaranteed to happen. Metal’s obsession with water and chthonic depths is one such predictably recurring aspect. Even when used as base set-dressing for album art and title, there is some sense of a certain heavily-referenced mythos weaving its way in through the cracks. As cliffs will all eventually break down into piles of sand via the crashing of the waves, you can expect at some point within the year we’re going to head into the depths below.
If anything, what is shocking is that it took until the middle of February to stumble upon one, though you could argue that even then the kind of group drawn to it is to be expected as well. What is alien in the galactic sphere is also alien in the waters below, and if there’s anything the modern age of tech-death groups love it is something alien. They can bend realities to their will in song form and subject matter, and the latest to lap from that particular font of inspiration is Colorado’s Cantu Ignis with their second full-length album The Fathomless Dominion.
The Fathomless Dominion is a weighty beast, six songs transpiring into a hair under thirty-seven minutes of music, roughly translating into every song ball-parking well over five minutes in length.
While they don’t quite achieve Alkaloid circa Liquid Anatomy territory with a closing song being over nineteen minutes long, Cantu Ignis still put up quite the opening barrier on The Fathomless Dominion with its opening cannon-salvo “Survey The Sun” weighing in at about eight and a half minutes. Were they slightly more pretentious this would be one of those songs wherein they’d have little subsegments for each particular movement within that song, but the act of dispensing with the bullshit and just combining it all into one olympian worthy high-jump of a song is just as appreciated.
It’s clear that through both this song and the album as a whole guitarist Jon Ryan had a truckload of ideas for this album, and what better place to pack them all in than your opener to start. Credit where credit is due though, because many of the ideas displayed in the opening song this time around resurface over and over throughout the rest of this release, including a love for acoustic guitar openings and closings. They’re just added on to the beefier runtimes of songs already in place and are no longer reserved as the ‘we must display ourselves as musicians’ segue number.
We’ve mused on this idea before, but for fear of turning to dust and blowing away in the next mild wind gust we’ll posit the idea once again: Tech-death in its current modernized form – the unholy amalgamation of thirty different forms of pre-fex core, neo-classical shredding, wild experimentation, a wall of melodeath, and Necrophagist worship – has been around long enough to be generational.
We’ve well past the ‘influenced by the influenced by’ crowd and into something that has had three to four distinct movements since the early-aughts. As many of those musicians have found themselves cycling around to new projects and playgrounds of ideas, so too does the style seem to cycle, with newer influences creeping around the edges. It’s long since left the genre an undefinable amorphous blob of extremity but also one wherein future advances seem to currently be now as the cutting edge quickly becomes the current precipice. Iteration is rapid in that way.
Which is a long path to travel when what you’re bumbling about is to say that Cantu Ignis‘ The Fathomless Dominion is almost classic in that way, calling to mind the mid-2010’s early obsession with symphonics around the edges and tempos that rarely left the high-speed paint-stripping side of things. Songs rarely come across as long so much as overly packed with ideas because they have to be by nature. When your opening song – as mentioned above – could easily have sub-movements listed in its title, even the shorter five-and-a-half-to-six-minute songs make you feel like you need a hard-hat and torch to traverse.
Cantu Ignis do keep things interesting on The Fathomless Dominion by also recognizing that they’re standing on the shoulders of giants as is, and so decide that they’re free to be more playful with the melodic side of things than you might expect. The titular “The Fathomless Dominion” is a tech-death song by way of a lot of melodeath and folk-metal elements, with keyboard stings and melodic lines that wouldn’t have felt out of line in Soilwork, Dark Tranquillity, and Children Of Bodom songs. What makes the song stand out so much is the fact that it arrives in the face of two very, very heavy yet traditional whirlwind assaults through the guitar-solo heavy-tech-minded sphere only to land on a song that bounces between that aforementioned style and the territory occupied by glory-riding double-bass rolls and solos so bright and shiny that they could blind a truck driver two states over if they catch the reflection at the wrong angle.
“The Fathomless Dominion” is also one of two songs that features a guest solo on it, with shredder Andy Gillion stepping up to the plate within this song’s bounds; former Scar Symmetry/Bloodshot Dawn axeman Ben Ellis contributes on the song following this one. There’s a definite air of ‘oh, what is this’ fascination to “The Fathomless Dominion” when it arrives fifteen-plus minutes – and two songs – into the album which took its name from the song.
The Fathomless Dominion excels because of that fascination. It is an album constructed around many of its lead melodic lines, and for every traditional impressive-as-all-get-out showpiece guitar solo there’ll be an actually memorable series of guitar leads that worm their way through a song. It’s not often that will happen with the tech-death crowd – the fretboard fireworks often win out by sheer magnitude – but keeping things tightly packed to six songs on The Fathomless Dominion works in Cantu Ignis‘ favor. Each song is its own little ‘mini-epic’, save for the actual ‘epic’ that launches the whole event. They’ve created a strange-sphere wherein they tiptoe on the edge of being a melo-tech-death band – though not quite as constructed around the knife-sharp and quick-moving rhythm riffs like Obscura were for a block of releases – but having a band still able to carve out a distinct handhold in a genre so immensely crowded that one movement creates waves in a sea is exciting all its own.
It may have taken a jackhammer and a couple of rocket launches to break into that particular cliffside but they have done so by immense force. Cantu Ignis‘ second full-length is worth submerging yourself under as it moves quickly enough that the hair under thirty-seven minutes it asks of you absolutely sails by.
https://cantuignis.bandcamp.com/album/the-fathomless-dominion
https://www.instagram.com/cantuignis/
https://www.facebook.com/people/Cantu-Ignis/100075152289039/