Rocker (feedbot)
Gold Member
The world is filled with incredible places. Should you ever have the chance to visit Krakow, take the time to explore the Wieliczka salt mines. A maze of tunnels, grand rooms, polished surfaces and pillars, these retired caverns offer a glimpse of the past. Deep underground, the sounds are muted and the air is strangely thick and fetid. What you experience is the result of hard work. Not the sweat of miners, not the toil of machinery, but the after. Orbit Culture’s new record, ‘Death Above Life’, evokes these deep cavernous spaces. It’s oppressive; a container for darkness that feels like a modern work indebted to the past. But the reason it brings to mind those mines is that, while standing in those silent caverns, if you close your eyes, you imagine you can hear the machinery.
The experience of pressing play on ‘Death Above Life’ is unforgettable. Maybe you’ve buried yourself under tonnes of metal records, maybe you haven’t, but the first thing that hits you is the sound mix, or rather, the first thing that hits you is the mechanical churn of crushing guitars. It’s heavy, but not just metal heavy, not even the bassy, low-tuned sound of the band’s 2023 album ‘Descent’. It sounds so heavy that you wonder just what knobs and dials they’ve twiddled to make it feel so crushing. While the sound resembles In Flames, it rivals Employed To Serve or even Meshuggah for sheer power. That’s not all. With the rapid chug of guitars in place, the cavernous boom of drums enter. They’re heavy too – echoes around the mines of Moria heavy, booming in a rhythm that demands you bang your head along to. It’s a startling sound, and it’s not just confined to the opening song ‘Inferna’ either. The whole record powers along like a freight train; the guitars are the engine, chugging rapidly, the drums are a counter-rhythm of passing sleepers and because of that sound mix it feels unstoppable, but also slightly difficult to listen to without a bottle of aspirin on standby.
Imagination is a strange and personal thing, so you might not find yourself thinking about the industrial revolution, and the Victorian era, where stories of children being churned up in the machines are ten-a-penny (and maybe wondering if there was a similar revolution in Sweden) but ‘Death Above Life’ certainly paints a vivid picture, mixing darkness and threat that might make you think of these environments, not least due to the repeating patterns and tension, which push the overall tone away from ‘traditional’ metal towards an industrial sound. The title track in particular combines clattering metal with pick scrapes to create a chilling yet neatly engineered dance. The spidery mechanical parts move back and forth while Niklas Karlsson’s vocals weave between them like a child avoiding being crushed in the machinery, creating a sense of threat and danger that makes the more melodic songs like ‘Inside The Waves’ extremely potent.Similarly, songs like ‘Hydra’ and ‘The Tales Of War’ are built around tension, using marching-style snare beats to wind it up before the riffs come smashing back in. And, of course, because gruff vocal hooks are threaded around the grooves and riffs, it really enhances their impact.
All this talk about machines brings to mind fabrication and stamping, where a die is used to make copies in a sheet of metal, like a cookie cutter. Despite the approach, this isn’t happening here. Each song uses different sounds and ideas and each expresses itself in different ways, with their inner workings never the same. However, after eight tracks, the persistent pounding does start to wear and wisely the band takes a different approach on the aptly named ‘Neural Collapse’. Clean sections are hammocked between riffs as the song opens out, setting the stage for the welcome detour on the final ‘The Path I Walk’ – combining clean singing with pagan chanting to bring the journey to a slightly off-kilter, but not unwelcome, end. So, despite its overall persistence, these flighty bursts of melody prove there’s more to the album than power; it’s cleverly constructed and artful. That said, the absolute pummelling of ‘Bloodhound’ is a straightforward barrage of anger and F-bombs, but it’s a counterpoint, the effectiveness of which is enhanced by it being the only track in this guise, making it a cog in small part of a larger machine.
One of the main problems with any kind of mechanisation is that the humanity gets stripped out. In this case, Buster Odeholm’s sound mix favours the power, the churn and the rhythm over the detail, meaning some of the fidelity is lost. The shredding guitars on songs like ‘Nerve’ feel quite understated, while the operatic opening to ‘The Tales Of War’ are smothered, making the album’s middle section feel less distinct than it is. This isn’t a problem per se, because these details exist, even if their richness is a little underserved.
‘Death Above Life’ is a dark, powerful metal record, filled with blistering chugging and ominous grooves. It sounds like a mining machine striking gold.
IAN KENWORTHY
The experience of pressing play on ‘Death Above Life’ is unforgettable. Maybe you’ve buried yourself under tonnes of metal records, maybe you haven’t, but the first thing that hits you is the sound mix, or rather, the first thing that hits you is the mechanical churn of crushing guitars. It’s heavy, but not just metal heavy, not even the bassy, low-tuned sound of the band’s 2023 album ‘Descent’. It sounds so heavy that you wonder just what knobs and dials they’ve twiddled to make it feel so crushing. While the sound resembles In Flames, it rivals Employed To Serve or even Meshuggah for sheer power. That’s not all. With the rapid chug of guitars in place, the cavernous boom of drums enter. They’re heavy too – echoes around the mines of Moria heavy, booming in a rhythm that demands you bang your head along to. It’s a startling sound, and it’s not just confined to the opening song ‘Inferna’ either. The whole record powers along like a freight train; the guitars are the engine, chugging rapidly, the drums are a counter-rhythm of passing sleepers and because of that sound mix it feels unstoppable, but also slightly difficult to listen to without a bottle of aspirin on standby.
Imagination is a strange and personal thing, so you might not find yourself thinking about the industrial revolution, and the Victorian era, where stories of children being churned up in the machines are ten-a-penny (and maybe wondering if there was a similar revolution in Sweden) but ‘Death Above Life’ certainly paints a vivid picture, mixing darkness and threat that might make you think of these environments, not least due to the repeating patterns and tension, which push the overall tone away from ‘traditional’ metal towards an industrial sound. The title track in particular combines clattering metal with pick scrapes to create a chilling yet neatly engineered dance. The spidery mechanical parts move back and forth while Niklas Karlsson’s vocals weave between them like a child avoiding being crushed in the machinery, creating a sense of threat and danger that makes the more melodic songs like ‘Inside The Waves’ extremely potent.Similarly, songs like ‘Hydra’ and ‘The Tales Of War’ are built around tension, using marching-style snare beats to wind it up before the riffs come smashing back in. And, of course, because gruff vocal hooks are threaded around the grooves and riffs, it really enhances their impact.
All this talk about machines brings to mind fabrication and stamping, where a die is used to make copies in a sheet of metal, like a cookie cutter. Despite the approach, this isn’t happening here. Each song uses different sounds and ideas and each expresses itself in different ways, with their inner workings never the same. However, after eight tracks, the persistent pounding does start to wear and wisely the band takes a different approach on the aptly named ‘Neural Collapse’. Clean sections are hammocked between riffs as the song opens out, setting the stage for the welcome detour on the final ‘The Path I Walk’ – combining clean singing with pagan chanting to bring the journey to a slightly off-kilter, but not unwelcome, end. So, despite its overall persistence, these flighty bursts of melody prove there’s more to the album than power; it’s cleverly constructed and artful. That said, the absolute pummelling of ‘Bloodhound’ is a straightforward barrage of anger and F-bombs, but it’s a counterpoint, the effectiveness of which is enhanced by it being the only track in this guise, making it a cog in small part of a larger machine.
One of the main problems with any kind of mechanisation is that the humanity gets stripped out. In this case, Buster Odeholm’s sound mix favours the power, the churn and the rhythm over the detail, meaning some of the fidelity is lost. The shredding guitars on songs like ‘Nerve’ feel quite understated, while the operatic opening to ‘The Tales Of War’ are smothered, making the album’s middle section feel less distinct than it is. This isn’t a problem per se, because these details exist, even if their richness is a little underserved.
‘Death Above Life’ is a dark, powerful metal record, filled with blistering chugging and ominous grooves. It sounds like a mining machine striking gold.
IAN KENWORTHY