CONSTRUCT OF LETHE – A KINDNESS DEALT IN VENOM

(Andy Synn has some kind, and some unkind, words for the new album from Construct of Lethe, out Friday on Transcending Obscurity)

There’s an argument to be made – in fact, I’m going to make it now – that Construct of Lethe‘s second album, 2018’s Exiler, is one of the best Death Metal albums of the last ten (and probably twenty) years.

But, after releasing such a milestone album (one which you might even be tempted to call a “masterpiece”, at least in the original sense of that word) what exactly was the band to do?

And the answer, it turns out, is to throw caution to the wind and construct an ambitiously flawed, yet absolutely fascinating (not to mention utterly ferocious) autobiographical concept album about the devastating doldrums of depression and suicidal ideation, split into 12 “chapters” (not all of which could be called “songs”), that is intended to be experienced as a singular, uninterrupted sequence.

So, without further interruption or delay… let’s dive in.

At its best, A Kindness Dealt In Venom serves as a seemingly effortless reminder of just how potent (and how punishing) Construct of Lethe‘s sound can be, especially during the album’s fantastic first half, whose first four tracks – “Artifice”, “Bete Noir”, “Contempt”, and “Denial In Abstraction” – practically explode out of the speakers in an unrelenting eruption of molten metallic magma.

And while clear comparisons can be made with the likes of Immolation (circa Harnessing Ruin), early 2000s Hate Eternal, and The Negation era Decapitated, due to the way that “Artifice” shifts back and forth between bludgeoning blasting and grinding groove, or how the band deploy both dissonant technicality and eerily infectious anti-melody to visceral effect during “Denial In Abstraction”, there’s more (much more) to this particular story than just an amalgamation of the band’s influences and/or inspirations.

The monolithic “Bete Noir” in particular showcases a much more structurally ambitious and sonically expansive side of the band – topping their previous longest track by almost a full two minutes and incorporating an altogether moodier, doomier aesthetic, as well prominent passages of anxiety-inducing ambience which somehow serve to make the track seem even heavier – while the crushingly claustrophobic “Contempt” weaves a similarly sinister atmospheric pall around its central core of contorted riffs and lacerating leads.

It’s only after this, however, as the unsettling ambient outro of “Contempt” fade into the ether, that the cracks in the band’s more “conceptual” approach begin to show, with the back-to-back instrumental interludes of “Flickering” and “I Am the Lionkiller” feeling more like the unfinished seeds of bigger, better songs (the former especially feels like a teasing fragment of something greater) than fully fleshed out ideas in their own right.

Unfortunately, this same issue then plagues a lot of the album’s second half, as although “Labyrinthine Terror” is probably one of the best songs Construct of Lethe have ever written (showing off shades of classic Mithras in its clever combination of outlandish extremity – including a positively vertebrae-breaking bass presence – and unsettlingly infectious, pseudo-melodic hooks) the various short song-segments which comprise the majority of the record’s last twenty minutes or so never quite coalesce in the way the band clearly intended.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments of brilliance – the moody death-march of “Monument to Failure” does more with its sub-three-minute run-time than a lot of bands manage in twice that, while the shred-heavy soundscapes of “Raw Nerve, Iron Will” probably should have been the album’s closer – it’s simply that the whole, despite the group’s best attempts, never quite manages to exceed the sum of its parts.

This is no reason to write the band off, however, since I would always rather any artist push themselves outside of their comfort zone and raise their ambitions, rather than simply sitting on their laurels and settling into a a familiar, but unfulfilling, creative rut (which, based on their previous successes, Construct of Lethe would have had every right to do).

In the end I have to applaud what the band have done here – there’s a lot going on, sure, and while not all of it works as well as perhaps they (and we) might have wanted, the moments where it all comes together, where the group successfully break through their own artistic boundaries, are more than worth the price of admission and suggest that we still haven’t heard the full extent of what Construct of Lethe could be capable of.