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Surprise reunions with old friends are a good thing. Way back in 2015, I reviewed the debut album from Attic, a band dabbling in several subgenres and occasionally happy spring-time lyrics, but making it all work. If you’d asked me recently if that was the last we’d heard of them, I probably would have bet that they’d moved on to day jobs, families, and all the rest. But here we are, almost five years after their debut, with a second album, Foster, in our hands and ears.
I think it says something that, in the sea of of Bandcamp notifications and promos I get, I immediately remembered who Attic was when I saw the new album notification. Their “bright death metal,” for lack of a better phrase, stood out in a crowd of OSDM caverncore bands. Foster sees the band with a new singer and down one guitarist, but the musical sensibilities that made Seasons so damn enjoyable are still present.
Attic still do the magic trick of mashing up doom, death, black, thrash, and some proggy tendencies all together without sounding like a sonic slop bucket. Hell, you can hear all of these in the opening track, “Of Endless Sage and Sky.” The death-doom intro leads to chunkier riffs, then the song slows down to a crawl with ringing riffs before firing back up to a thrashing good time. It should make for a distracted listen, but Attic uses all these and still sounds like the same band throughout. In a time when it sometimes seems like memorable riffs are few and far between, Attic puts out a barn burner like “The Wyrm,” filled with chugging riffs that make me want to drive a million miles an hour and pound the steering wheel.
Attic has brought forward a lot of what they did well on their debut. The simple, ringing riff that opens “Summer” harkens back to “Spring” on Seasons. “Summer” has a sunrise-breaking feeling carried by all of four notes, but the band favors this kind of straightforward melodicism, and in another move that could turn deadly in leser hands, they use repetition to build momentum, like in “The Washing.” This is not a case of “We like this riff so we’ll keep playing it until the audience leaves to get a beer.” This is “We’re going to wring every bit of metal goodness out of this riff until we’re all spent.”
Add all this in with and overall stronger sense of songwriting and style, while still pushing the edges a bit (check out the cool pizzicato riff and whispering vocals of the closer “Particle”), and we’re left with an album that gives no indication of a long gap between recordings. It’s a unique band that’s managed to survive and progress. But I better not have to wait five more years for another album, or I’ll...furrow my brow? Frown? That’s menacing, right?