artwork by Dan Goldsworthy
(On March 28th The Absence will release a new self-titled album via Listenable Insanity Records, and we’ve got DGR‘s extensive review of it below.)
You could argue that it’s a common enough situation that it shouldn’t warrant a raised eyebrow, but six albums in is usually not the expected timeframe for one to get the honor of being the self-titled one.
Maybe it’s just us, but there’s a lot to be said for being the ‘self-titled’ album. It usually marks a few things within a group’s history; it’s either the one with the definitive sound for the band, or the complete reinvention. Sometimes the event of the ‘self-titled’ is usually two or three albums in, when it seems a group has finally honed its craft. The self-titled album is stating to the world that this release is such and such band.
You usually don’t get the self-titled album this late unless the band have opted for the second of our two above-mentioned scenarios, wherein the group are completely reinventing themselves and taking a serious gamble. It’s a way to dodge the curse of naming your release after a phoenix or some new-born flame because that almost wills your group into breaking up soon after. Yet with The Absence‘s The Absence we’re not really facing any of those scenarios.
Photo Credit: Deidra Kling
You could argue instead that what we’re looking at here is The Absence making an album that sounds the most like how The Absence sounded when they were launching themselves into the fray for the first time, dating all the way back to the days of their first EP and later album From Your Grave.
The Absence were a band that seemed to exist by sheer force of will, a group firmly oriented towards the early-aughts era of melodeath – minus the keyboard worship – scrapping it out in an increasingly -core focused country. Rather than walking the path of many of those groups and using the genre as a launching point for an eventual swath of albums composed of two-step riffs and breakdowns galore, the band remained a purer vein of melodeath than you’d have ever expected to emerge into the view of a major label.
The US has always had oddities, one-offs, and seasoned groups hacking away at it forever but few ever broke through; the style seemed reserved strictly for the European side of the world. The Absence became something that existed by force and yet somehow every few years managed to crank out a new release that saw them both sounding better production-wise, but also getting meaner in their songwriting. 2007’s Rides Of The Plague is an album that to this day your dearest author will go to bat for. But after 2010’s Enemy Unbound, The Absence went silent and it seemed for the better part of a decade the band would exist with an EP, three albums, and two singles to their name. Case: Closed. Book slammed shut loudly enough that every neighbor on NextDoor is wondering if a train blew up close by.
It took until 2018 for The Absence to return, and surprisingly enough they did so as a full band, emerging as a five-piece once again in spite of their lineup either shedding or shifting constantly in the eight years between with A Gift For The Obsessed in 2018 – counting journeyman shredder Joey Concepcion and newer guitarist/Florida death metal resurrector Taylor Nordberg among their ranks – and since then have kept to an increasingly solid pattern of every three years a new album and one less band member than before.
2021’s Carbonized saw the band as a four-piece and now 2024 sees another change, with bassist Mike Leon stepping in over recent years to help out in Soulfly‘s lineup, and The Absence releasing their self-titled album with three people at the helm of the good ship via the label which serves as the main outlet for most projects the duo of Jeramie Kling and Taylor Nordberg are involved in: Listenable Insanity Records.
The Absence‘s self-titled album is a sleek release by comparison to everything else they’ve done. It’s their shortest album to date, punching in at a little over thirty-seven minutes. Most of the songs on The Absence are around three to four minutes long and the two times when the band indulge themselves and wander into the high-five range they immediately offset it by having something quicker (or shorter) soon after. Having one song be an acoustic mid-point for a minute and half – “Surface Of A Dead World ” – does wonders for bringing the average run time down and keeping things well in the realm of ‘no bullshit’.
“Communion Carbonized” moves things along quickly with a riff that could’ve equally come from both The Absence‘s and Arch Enemy‘s playbooks, depending on where your musical-influence dart lands that particular day. It’s also a song people will likely be familiar with since it was a lead-off single for the band alongside its following sibling “The Silent Eye”. Both songs work in tandem as part of the ‘welcome home’ act many releases have to do, with “The Silent Eye” in particular covering a wide auditory ground, lyrically acting as if its chorus could be stolen by Amon Amarth in the future and musically maintaining the straightforward aggressive lead-heavy melodeath that The Absence have hermit-crabbed their way into while also pulling backwards to the song “Merciless” from Riders Of The Plague. It’s an experience watching a song morph itself into a musical tunnel through time like that.
The Absence‘s mid-section is quite death-obsessed in comparison to venom-spitting closers “Escape Artist” and “Breeding Hysterics”. It’s as if the album has a handful of small acts throughout: its opening numbers, its vicious closers, and its death-obsessed mid-point with songs like “Vagrant Death” and “Planetary Mortuary” being the foundation those are built upon. “Vagrant Death” is your classic ride-to-battle, lead-guitar-heavy chorus, but also one of those songs that really contributes to the feeling of The Absence toying with the idea of pulling from all over their career with this album.
You could treat “Planetary Mortuary” as the following prog-number in its musical exploration, but truth be told, it’s just a longer song. The Absence take their time developing the song before finally getting to the solid double-bass roll that seems to propel the entire number and provide many excuses for them to have fun with the phrase “Oceanic necropolis” and the titular “Planetary Mortuary” in the chorus. Near-six minutes of song allows plenty of room for guitarist Taylor Nordberg to break out every lead and solo part that could conceivably fit within the song’s boundaries. More than once will you hear something different being played out of that specific direction that expounds upon an idea that appeared briefly way earlier in the song. Part of the up-front lead work, a constantly shifting melody, and a surprising amount of interstitial stitching together could be credited to the spotlight on the guitar within “Planetary Mortuary”.
The Absence do at least seem a little aware of how an album of straight-shooters like their self-titled can start to blur together, and they try to distinguish them wherever they can. Often that work falls in the introductory bits of each song before the band are back to tackling their tried and true. This does lead to some surprises, like The Absence getting into the acoustic introduction game with “Fleshwalker” before delving into the business of the dead for another three minutes.
“Fleshwalker” is pretty hard-driving and places itself perfectly among the meaner closing numbers that we mentioned earlier, but will likely grab most of its attention based off of the intro segue as much as the main riff pile-drives people into the dirt. Again, the song is well within the established pattern of the few longer exploratory numbers being immediately melted to ash by the song following. “The Silent Eye” gets blowtorched by “Vagrant Death”, whereas “Fleshwalker” gets the pleasure of immolating “Grieving Winds” before it.
For as much as The Absence is a good and quick listen there is a sense throughout the album that perhaps The Absence are a little too in thrall to their older selves throughout. The band have buried – both intenionally and unintenionally it seems – easter eggs and callbacks throughout the album that seem to take The Absence out of its place as an album of 2024 and instead scatter it throughout the rest of their career. Part of this could be credited to the group’s chosen musical themes, with songs like the aforementioned “Communion Carbonized” acting as if it could be perfectly placed within the running of the group’s 2021 Coffinized – perhaps right after the song “Coffinized” just so you could have fun with the ‘-izing’ of things. Vocalist Jamie Stewart especially seems to be having fun with this, a few times throughout the album resurrecting old lyrical patterns like a mad necromancer who just really wants to see how many times he can utter the words “stained glass”.
The self-titled’s production style harkens far back as well, firmly ensconced in the project studio world and a lot less clean than The Absence have had in the past. It could be viewed as a continuation of the album throwing itself back and forth throughout time, but honestly, you never would’ve expected in 2024 to have a release that sounds like it could’ve been the double-album twin of 2005’s From Your Grave quite like The Absence‘s self-titled does here.
The Absence‘s The Absence leaves us in a strange place, having spent much of its thirty-seven minutes in a tumble dryer of The Absence‘s career as a whole and issuing forth material both new and also sounding like different albums being mashed together just to see what sort of monstrosity emerges. Moving surprisingly quick in the realm of previous discs that at face value would look indulgent by comparison, The Absence is an album that at times will feel like it is making as many call-backs to its earlier roots as it does looking forward, resulting in a listening experience that hovers around enjoyable but doesn’t quite provide that hit of adrenaline that comes from feeling like the band are lurching in any particular direction. Rather The Absence spread outward and kind of congeal throughout their self-titled in a perfectly shaped circle and level off from there.
You could argue for the nature of this being their self-titled because of the fact that The Absence truly have archived the sound of The Absence here. It is the most The Absence-esque album that the band could’ve created — production-wise sounding like their earlier works and song-wise sounding like they’ve cherry-picked their favorite moments from previous albums while occasionally dipping into the wider book of melodeath standards for inspiration. The needle doesn’t so much move for The Absence as it instead becomes a whole lot heavier and more apparent with the realization that, yes, The Absence are in fact still here and are going to make music that sounds the most like The Absence that they possibly can.
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