(This makes the fourth, and apparently final, installment of DGR‘s effort to clear out a backlog of reviews he’s been pondering for releases spread across earlier months of the year, clearing the decks for the year-end NCS orgy ahead.)
It is wild, staring at the review collective and realizing you’re down to the last two.
The best time to write one of these is not directly after one has woken up, I’ve learned. Something about the brain still trying to wander itself out of the fog with nary a static radio signal and flashlight for help tends to make one’s writing look as if it slid off the side of a mountain.
The artist’s curse is still a minor player at the poker table though, given that some of your best ideas usually arrive in the shower, the drive home from work, or the second before you hit deep sleep, so that’s not to say I still won’t be attempting to do so as if writing right after I’m waking up for the day is preserving some sort of the mental cacophony I’ve tried to piece together for the final one of this initial review pile.
While it’s been clear that the scope of this has long grown out of control, at the very least I can say that this is the final one of these shorter, more informal review collections, and then I can turn my eye back to what’s been coming out more recently. Luckily, the recent gathering of writers we’ve had around here have done a pretty good job covering the “I feel like we should have a say about this as it seems culturally important to the metal-sphere” slate of releases, so I’ve been free to run through the wheat fields with abandon when it comes to playing around with stuff that has shot past us throughout the year.
Maybe it’s not so much the waking up that’s been providing the lifeforce to plow through this final slate as it has been the view of the end of the line. Not that this ever truly ends; the compulsion to bullhorn new music from what pulpit we may have created here will always remain.
OAK, ASH & THORN – OUR GRIEF IS THUS
Previous installments of this “feature” have been pretty even-keeled when it came to the release dates of albums. Largely reflective of an inordinant amount of releases that came out in May – per my attempt to load the site up with stuff before fucking off to NWTF and MDF – this overall collection of reveiws has served mainly as a way to both make up to artists for not covering a release when I should have, and a way to catch up because I always love a good excuse to not have to be in the rat race of the most recent.
That said, there’re still some of these where it seems like I’m trying to set a record for missing the bus by the furthest possible distance without it turning out that the route I was waiting at had been cancelled three years ago. Such is the case with Our Grief Is Thus by Oak, Ash, & Thorn, which hit in the latter part of April 2024, yet was hoovered up into the coverage pile in May and is only just now being “gotten around to”. It’d be almost comedic if I didn’t feel like part of this writeup should consist of me sending an apology note to the group’s P.O box for being seven months late on saying somethng about one of the more constant listens from that initial collection effort.
Colorado’s Oak, Ash & Thorn gloriously dance across a handful of different genre lines. The American melodeath scene has been severely underrated over the years, quickly eclipsed by its metalcore-leaning counterparts and also never really given the air of legitimacy one might’ve expected. Perhaps a matter of distance from genre-birthplace in play, the style has been earmarked as recognizably European for a long time, and so a group hailing from Colorado in the US might not be where one’s eye is originally focused.
Oak, Ash & Thorn use building blocks of that style, alongside a very Northwestern strain of black metal weaving its way into their sound, and as one might expect, a fair bit of folk-metal in the musical influence. Though not fully tripartite, you could almost look at the three elements of the band’s name covering three different styles all melded into what has become the group’s newest album – again, new as of April. You could also recognize pretty quickly that two of those three elements are likely to perk my personal interest from moment one, and the third if they get it right? Bonus gravy on top of an already strong meal.
Like many of the albums featured in this review collective, Our Grief Is Thus does not want for ambition. At eight songs and thirty-eight and a half minutes, with one of those songs being a forty-second instrumental, Our Grief Is Thus consists of some distinctly epic numbers. Every song here hovers around the five-plus minute mark and Oak, Ash & Thorn make use of all the time afforded them.
Whether attempting to soar high on a big clean-singing number, ripping through thrashier-melodeath bits, dishing out blastbeats as if at a soup-kitchen for the death metal homeless, or bathing in atmospherics and echoes worthy of the black-metal crowd, Our Grief Is Thus is an album traveling from a lot of different directions, and for the most part manages to blend them all together pretty well for a fully multi-faceted experience. Thematically fit for wandering the forest by oneself, you could pick any grouping of songs on Our Grief Is Thus and find yourself on an epic musical adventure, even as the band attempt to inject a sense of loss and overall melancholy every few songs.
Our Grief Is Thus actually splits itself in half surprisingly well by placing the instrumental “Bury Deep My Tired Bones” as close to the center of the album as the band could. At eight songs, one half of this release was bound to be a little heavier on the musical side of things, and in the case of Our Grief Is Thus it is the back half of the album. “Distant Mountains, Distant Gods” is one of the bigger songs within the tracklisting, providing a full six-minute journey through the cold and atmospheric, playing up grandiose ambitions for musical adventure and being one of two songs that feel like Oak, Ash & Thorn standing behind a lectern and highlighting earlier songs on their album, echoing out “In SUMMATION…..”.
The other one of those could be credited to follower “Unchain The Wolf”, as if a large portion of this release had existed solely to inject as many of the ideas in the last two songs as possible throughout earlier parts of the album, so that the listener could finally hear the two congeal for the album’s last eleven-and-a-half minutes into a full Our Grief Is Thus closing moment.
That’s not to dismiss a song like “Dying Culture” – one of the release’s leadoff singles – as that one does an excellent opening act of laying out a large part of where the Our Grief Is Thus travels will take you. It’s one of the album’s quicker numbers as well, which is truly appreciated and gives the band part of their melodeath tag. It segues surprisingly well into the equally intense “Like The Sea I Raged”. You know you’ve got an interesting album on your hands when the songs that tend to keep rattling around in the empty cavern that is your skull are the bookending tracks and the instrumental breather in the middle, as if reading a book to get a sense of the world, skipping to the end just to see if you recognize any of it, and being so hooked by the ideas in closing that you just have to know how in the world you were going to wind up there.
I know I’m not doing much to change the winds when it comes to helping get the word out about a release, arriving over half a year late and in a suit so threadbare and beaten that I could be the stereotypical “down on his luck conman” in a 1940’s movie. Yet, Our Grief Is Thus has been a fairly consistent recurrence in the listening pile throughout the year after I finally got around to enjoying it. Groups like this tend to fly hard under the radar by virtue of asking just a little more than a one-dimensional entry-level “hey we’re crazy heavy” approach to music. Not to say I myself don’t devour those sorts of things like a kid in a candy store, but there’s also room for groups asking for just a little more investment as well, and in the case of Oak, Ash & Thorn‘s musical wanderings that investment pays off.
Each of the album’s seven travels is one wherein the group attempt to forge as many approaches to their multi-pronged genre-fork as they can, and like mentioned before, manage to do so impressively well. Songs on Our Grief Is Thus travel organically with few segments feeling like they’ve been bolted on and held together via metal brackets. As only the second release for the band, Our Grief Is Thus holds a lot of promise for a potential third release and one that could truly blossom out of an already strong planting here.
https://oakashandthorn.bandcamp.com/album/our-grief-is-thus
https://www.facebook.com/ofoakashandthorn
FRACTAL GATES – ONE WITH DAWN
Surprisingly enough, we’ve actuallly kept pretty abreast with the goings on of France’s progressive melodeath group Fractal Gates over the course of their career. Either through side-projects or the main act itself – while it may have taken some time – we’ve done an okay-ish job at discussing the new music hailing from the increasingly galactic-minded and keyboard-heavy melodeath crew.
Fractal Gate‘s newest full-length, One With Dawn, was released toward the tail end of April this year, and is one of those discs I’d been meaning to get around to for some time. But also, for as much as I was to drag my feet when it came to actually sitting down and trying to form some sort of cogent picture out of the mental sludge that I’ve been sifting these reviews out of lately, it’s also a tiny bit of a gift that the wait was so long, because like the three Fractal Gates releases beforehand One With Dawn is a big album. Each Fractal Gates full-length release has been ballpark forty-five to fifty-plus minutes in length and the extended edition of One With Dawn rolls up to nearly an hour, thanks to the inclusion of some reworked and modernized bonus songs from earlier on in the band’s career.
Each Fractal Gates release has been reflective of a lot of musical growth for the band as well. Every release clocking at the indulgent time lengths listed above has been largely how the Fractal Gates crew have earned their progressive tag. They truly have been writing some journeys over the course of their career. But what has been interesting is that as they’ve gone on the band have gotten a lot better about filling the space. Not so much a constant tossing of every musical knick-knack the band could come across to fill the time, but actual interesting musical motifs, leads, percussive moments, vocal lines, you name it.
The music has remained consistently long, but now, four albums in, Fractal Gates are putting in the lion’s share of actually justifying the lengthier songs that they’ve placed before you. After all, space is big and Fractal Gates have been using it as both metaphor and legitimate lyrical inspiration for some time, the keyboards often evoking movie soundtrack quality to provide a sense of drifting through a vast openness. One With Dawn is their most focused effort on that front by far, so much so that even when the album itself wraps up and you sail into the group’s historical retrospective for two songs, they’ve been molded to form and fit well enough within the regular album’s lineup.
Much like the album preceeding it, One With Dawn is focused heavily on building atmospherics for a cosmic journey. The musical shorthand that seems to have evolved over the years for this is a lot of spacey-sounding keyboards. Expansive reaches of different notes waft in and out of songs during the album’s more ambient moments, but Fractal Gates are always pretty aware of the fact that it is another instrument, making full use of it for a melodic lead ala Omnium Gatherum and more than once letting it be the dominant line for the guitar work to follow.
Fractal Gates rotate between a relatively up-tempo songwriting style and a faster-mid as well, saving the doomier or slower-moving tracks for the group’s other projects. Fractal Gates are progressively minded but they show that by having expansive songs that are dense, not just because they’re willing to slow things down at a moment’s notice so everyone can tool around and show off. They use a strong sense of melancholy as well, which could largely be why vocalist Sebastien Pierre has two other projects of a similar but more doom-minded vein in Cold Insight and Enshine – he even calls in fellow Enshine bandmate Jari Lindholm to help out with a couple of songs on One With Dawn – mayhaps the three are starting to blend together into one void-frozen monstrosity of its own.
It is fun to drift through the instrumental scene-setter songs that have long been a theme for the band, and on the group’s fourth album you’ll get three “Visions” tracks. Penned by guitarist Stéphane Peudupin and vocalist Sebastien Pierre, these songs traditionally lay at the bookends of the album and one more in the center. Synth-heavy and gorgeous sounding, they’re the reminders that the audioscape that Fractal Gates play in is meant to be cold. The two at the end also arrive after some of the more intense songs on the album, whereas the opening “Vision” basically lulls you into a somewhat false sense of security before the band play the classic card of having one of the faster songs open up the event in “Shining Fall”.
Considering there is so much music here, Fractal Gates do an impressive job of having a fair number of highlights pretty evenly spread out. The pairing of “Earthbound” and “Half-Alive” makes for a good center section. Previously mentioned opener “Shining Fall” is a lot of fun and “Seamless Days” picks up the baton that song was carrying and runs it a little further. The two songs featuring Daylight Dies‘ own Egan O’Rourke on clean vocals – the titular “One With Dawn” and “Echoing Motions” – almost partially skate by on how nice it is to hear him singing again, but both are also the more galactic-drift-minded of the songs on this album. If you’re meant to be seeing beauty in the vastness before you, those are two songs that work the hardest to keep the job done.
One of the appreciable things about Fractal Gates is that they spend a lot of time with their music. Over the years, the gaps between releases have grown incrementally larger but the artwork on the back end of that trip always seems like it has spent that equal amount of time in the forge. It must take a lot to hammer away at songs like this and have them dancing between keyboard-heavy melodeath, melodic-minded and melancholy-infused passages, the occasional oddball time signature to show off, and the straightforward adrenaline rush.
You could slam all these things together and have them be angular and difficult to parse, sounding as if they’ve been assembled with a nailgun, but Fractal Gates do a good job making all of One With Dawn flow, and even more so that they’ve crafted all of these to still stick with their obsession with both the emptiness and grandness of space. Drawing allegory from that and melding it with their own personal instrospections, Fractal Gates have released an impressive piece of work on One With Dawn, one that follows up and pairs well with 2018’s The Light That Shines and one that continues an excellent forward, if slightly incremental, leap in the band’s overall growth.
https://fractalgates.bandcamp.com/album/one-with-dawn
https://www.facebook.com/fractalgates/