Beyond Grace - Seekers

By Professor D. Grover the XIIIth. Greetings and salutations, friends. Once more, I return from the void that is adult life and parenthood to discuss a particularly appealing and intriguing musical work. Today, we examine Seekers

By Professor D. Grover the XIIIth.

Artwork by Michael Cowell

Greetings and salutations, friends. Once more, I return from the void that is adult life and parenthood to discuss a particularly appealing and intriguing musical work. Today, we examine Seekers, the relatively recent release from Nottingham's own Beyond Grace. I say relatively because Seekers has been out for several months, but I've been otherwise preoccupied and so it has taken me much longer than I'd prefer to work up a proper review.

Beyond Grace are something of a modern-style technical death metal band, although the label itself is unduly restrictive. Technical death metal may be a large part of the foundation of the band's sound, but it's heavily dosed with melodic, progressive, and blackened aspects of death metal. Now, I know what you are likely thinking: there are a lot of bands out there that meld these styles together, and so it gets harder and harder for a band to stand out, so why should you give Beyond Grace your precious listening time? And you are correct, the modern technical/melodic/progressive/blackened death metal scene has become incredibly saturated in the past several years. It's not enough for a band to possess a great deal of technical skill, because there are a hundred other bands full of chaps filling their songs with fleet-fingered arpeggios and mind-melting scales. It's not enough to have a drummer who can change tempos on a dime. It's not enough to have a bassist who can simultaneously underscore the riffs and provide an adventurous counter-melody.

And that brings me to Beyond Grace's true strength, which is their songwriting. They clearly have the elements I just mentioned, like many bands, but those talents are often wasted on disjointed, uninteresting songs that exist more as a collection of technically impressive but ultimately monotonous musicality. Beyond Grace, on the other hand, understand and value the importance of restrained and cohesive songwriting, and that's the true heart of Seekers. There are moments of absolute ferocity, instances of brilliant technicality, but there is always a sense of control, which lets the band take on mid-tempo material effectively, something a lot of technical death metal bands struggle with.

It helps that the album sounds immaculate. Sometimes this can lead to a feeling of sterility, of inhuman mechanality (I'm not sure if that's actually a word, but it is now), but there's a sense of power in Seekers' production that keeps the listener grounded. Vocalist Andy Walmsley alternates deep guttural roars with higher-pitched screams with ease, yet his vocals remain intelligible enough that the lyrics can be understood. Guitarist Tim Yearsley shows a knack for laying down bruising riffs and intoxicating melodies, while bassist Andrew Workman intertwines his own melodies, granting the songs additional depth. The backbone of it all is drummer Ed Gorrod, whose nimble style sees him switching tempos seamlessly while adding texture to the songs with his fills and footwork.

The lyrics are one of the highlights of the album, thanks to the writing of Walmsley. You may know him as Andy Synn, a longtime writer for No Clean Singing, and his work as a writer serve him well, granting his words an intelligence that elevates Seekers even further above many of their contemporaries. One of my personal favorite details is that the track "Apoptosis" is heavily influenced by Jeff VanderMeer's brilliant novel Annihilation, the first book in the deeply unsettling Southern Reach trilogy. Moreover, Walmsley reached out to VanderMeer and got his permission to use some excerpts from the book in the lyrics. It's a wonderful touch on an already excellent song.

In some ways, Seekers is linked in my mind with Blood of the Prophets' album The Stars of the Sky Hid from Me (reviewed by yours truly here). Both bands are stellar examples of how the ability to write coherent, intriguing songs can help a band stand out among similar sounding bands. Seekers is a labor of love from a hard-working band, and the attention to detail paid to these songs is what makes them truly shine. I simply cannot recommend this album highly enough. Beyond Grace have established themselves as a band to be reckoned with.

Podcast of Death: Ingurgitating Oblivion Interview

By Bryan Camphire. Welcome to the Podcast of Death, the first (but hopefully not last) podcast on Metal Bandcamp. In our inaugural episode Bryan interviews Florian Engelke from Ingurgitating Oblivion, a death metal band from Germany.

By Bryan Camphire.


Welcome to the Podcast of Death, the first (but hopefully not last) podcast on Metal Bandcamp. In our inaugural episode Bryan interviews Florian Engelke from Ingurgitating Oblivion, a death metal band from Germany. Their latest album, Vision Wallows in Symphonies of Light, is unlike any other record you'll hear this year, and it is excellent. Florian, the mastermind behind Ingurgitating Oblivion, was kind enough to speak to our intrepid reporter via Skype to answer some questions about his unique vision of music.

Visions... is a collection of four long-form tunes that are packed with dynamics. The heavy sections are chock full of unorthodox guitar harmony and blistering convulsive rhythms. The guitar uses a lot of sustain - letting notes ring out for several beats, which is a technique more common to doom rather than death metal. Interestingly, the rhythm section keeps churning and pummelling throughout, giving the music an almost seasick off kilter feeling like an uproarious crashing sea amidst a horrible storm.

The above quote is from Bryan's review of Vision Wallows in Symphonies of Light. You can read the rest, and listen to the album, right here.

Yellow Eyes - Immersion Trench Reverie

By Justin C. I've always had an interesting listener-band relationship with Yellow Eyes. I jumped on board with their 2013 full-length, Hammer of Night, but not without some resistance. It's entirely possible I'm developing synesthesia

By Justin C.


I've always had an interesting listener-band relationship with Yellow Eyes. I jumped on board with their 2013 full-length, Hammer of Night, but not without some resistance. It's entirely possible I'm developing synesthesia, but Yellow Eyes' sound is abrasive in an almost physically tactile way. Describing metal music often involves figurative physical descriptions of head-snapping and gut-punching, but Yellow Eyes sometimes seems like they're trying to scrape the outer layer of my epidermis off. I resist it at first, sometimes finding it a bit too hard to listen to, but then I end up listening to each new album 17 times in a row.

And that remains true on their new album, Immersion Trench Reverie. I really loved Sick with Bloom, which our own Mr. Sunyata described thusly: "Whorls and eddies of dense melodic alchemy evoke the nofucksgiving of Weakling, while skirting the esoteric inhumanity of Krallice." That certainly applies to Immersion, and I'd have a hard time topping that description, but I'll see what I can do.

Immersion Trench Reverie lacks some of the immediacy that I felt with Sick with Bloom, but that's not a knock on either album. Immersion is dense, dissonant, and difficult, but every time I thought I might take a break from it, I felt pulled back. I started to crave that low-fi-but-not-really esthetic, scratching an itch somewhere in my brain. I needed to hear the contrapuntal riffs that open up "Shrillness in the Heated Grass," punctuated by Will Skarstad's pained shrieks. Or the quiet acoustic instruments that open "Blue as Blue," only to give way to layers of distorted guitar I'd call "lush" if they didn't retain so much of their harsh edge.

The visual imagery invoked by the song titles and lyrics are another fascinating facet of the music. The album title brings to mind the trench warfare of World War I (when the term "trench foot" came into use to describe the horrible damage done to the feet of soldiers constantly standing in cold water), while "Velvet on the Horns" of course brings to mind deer shedding the fuzzy outer coating of their horns--often by scraping them against trees--in preparation for rutting season and stag battle. "Velvet" was the only song I had lyrics to at the time of this writing, and the lyrics manage to be evocative and oblique at the same time. The song opens with the stanza

Overnight
Or was it not
Green ragged cloth had fallen
On the path
The way I took had velvet on the horn

Certainly sounds woodsy, but the later lyrics go in almost a suburban direction:

Imagine that a propane tank
When squarely struck
Becomes a bell
Yet huddles by the driveway in the cold

Why do I suddenly have melancholy feelings for an anthropomorphized propane tank? What is this black metal witchery?

Kim Kelly summed up Sick with Bloom in her 2015 year-end list as simply "The future of American black metal." I agree wholeheartedly, and that makes Immersion the beguiling next step into that promising future.