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Deathevokation: The chalice of ages
30/06/09 || Daemonomania
This album has everything going for it. Sunlight style production, beefy guitars serving up brutal riffs, bottom end gravelly growls, neat but not overdone acoustic parts, drumming to hasten your departure from this earth. Why, then, don’t I like it?
To get an answer, let’s travel back in time to 1992. In these majestic days of Swedeath a Finnish band called Amorphis dropped a little album on us called “The karelian isthmus.” Regarded by many as a classic, the Finns took the basic ideas of peers like Entombed and Grave and instead of emphasizing the switches between slow doomy crushing punishment and fast polka-thrash attacks, they decided to add a healthy dose of melody and let the songs kind of ooze along. While the verb ooze can sometimes mean good things, in this case it does not. My opinion is that the songs on KI don’t fucken go anywhere. They’re there, they linger, they pass. I’m sure the playing is sharper, the compositions more intricate, yadda yadda yadda than anything from “Into the grave”. But that certainly doesn’t make it better.
So fast forward to 2007, and the upbeat Californians who populate Deathevokation decided to take this same approach and master the secret of the ooze. Minus the Ninja Turtles. And I’m left just as uninterested in their efforts as I was with Amorphis. Parts of “Chalice” are awesome, some of the guitarwork is downright beautiful, and those growls are to die for. Obviously these dudes know how to create a dark, suffocating atmosphere and incorporate good samples. Nonetheless, I’ll be goddamned if you can actually rock out to it. Gimmie a song off “You’ll never see” any day over anything Deathevokation has ever put out. Actually, take that statement and switch Deathevokation with most retro-comeback-Swedeathers.
There you have it. If you hunger for more of the sound from “The karelian isthmus,” you’ll love this band to pieces. I still think the originals were better and even the original version of this recipe seemed pretty half-baked. 5 great elements that don’t quite add up to the whole Voltron outta 10.
- Information
- Released: 2007
- Label: Xtreem Music
- Website: www.deathevokation.com
- Band
- Götz Vogelsang: vocals, guitar
- Brian Shuff: guitar
- Steve Brogden: guitars
- Scott Ellis: drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Rites of Desecration
- 02. Acherontic Epitaph
- 03. The Monument
- 04. Embers of a Dying World
- 05. The Chalice of Ages
- 06. Infinity Blights the Flesh
- 07. Carrion
- 08. Chunks of Meat (Antropomorphia cover)
- 09. As My Soul Gazes Skywards
