Archive Review: Pestilence's Spheres (1993/2007)

Dutch heavy metal trailblazers Pestilence – along with contemporaries like Death, Cynic, and Atheist – stood at the creative forefront of the late ‘80s death metal movement. They defined the sound, the stylistic vacuum cleaner roar of the genre’s vocals, and the instrumental fusion of fast-n-furious thrash with deliberately bone-crushing heavy metal…and tens of thousands of teenage listeners swapped their white t-shirts in for logo-clad black cotton battle armor.

For many of these bands, though, the purebred expectations of death metal and its rabid fans became chains to restrict their sound rather than supporting the expansion of their creative endeavors. Such as it was with Pestilence – the band charted its course with a pair of brutal, razor-blade bulldozers in 1988’s Malleus Maleficarum and the following year’s Consuming Impulse. They navigated off the map with 1991’s Testimony of the Agents though…when vocalist Martin Van Drunen left the band over creative differences, guitarist Patrick Mameli took over on vox…and the new helmsman steered the band towards a more progressive musical course. Conservative death metal fans disliked that album, but not nearly as much as they hated 1993’s Spheres, Pestilence’s fourth and final effort.

Pestilence’s Spheres

Mameli took his talented crew into uncharted waters with this masterpiece of complex, elemental, progressive metal that literally took the normal, accepted death metal blueprint and set it on fire, then drowned it in a vat of boiling oil. The first half of Pestilence’s Spheres more or less walks a conventional death metal line. “Mind Reflections,” for instance, offers up enough machine-gun drumbeats, tortured guitarwork, guttural vocals and manic energy to satisfy any died-in-the-wool hesher. “Multiple Beings” starts to get a little loosey-goosey with song structure, serving up some head-snapping time changes and discordant, Fripperian six-string squonk. “The Level of Perception” hides a complex and maddening rhythmic construct beneath its concrete-smashing fury.

The album’s first “musical interlude” – the atmospheric “Aurian Eyes” – tip-toes not-so-elegantly into the avant-garden of composers like Phillip Glass, its stark beauty and crashing horizon painting a dark psychological portrait in a mere 92 seconds. By the time that the polyglot instrumental frenzy of “Soul Search” hits the listener’s ears, the corpse-paint has been peeled from this edifice…Spheres has clearly entered into newfound, and dangerous territory. Mameli’s six-string mangling throughout “Soul Search” is disturbingly brilliant, a chaotic tangle of razor wire, rusty chains and glass shards that shatters the artificial barriers of death metal propriety.

“Personal Energy” comes at you like a voice from the inner recess of your mind, the muted albeit industrial-strength rhythms complimented by a taut jazz-fusion guitar line that Stan Lassiter or Al DiMeola would have been proud to crank out. “Voices From Within,” the second brief though incredible musical interlude on Spheres, sounds like Ralph Towner on steroids, second guitarist Patrick Uterwijk’s electronically-altered axe carrying the Pestilence crew dangerously close to the siren’s shore of Sun Ra’s dreams. Steering away at the last minute with the raw, dissembled title track, its familiar cranium-crushing brutality should have soothed any disaffected death-kiddies’ fears…until the third brilliant instrumental break of the album combines a chilling lead with a stabbing riff. The song ends with a cool prog-styled keyboard run, strictly anathema to young early ‘90s headbangers.

Changing Perspectives

The martial “Changing Perspectives” foreshadows Sepultura’s mid-’90s work on Roots, Mameli’s vocals reduced to a mere howl, tribal rhythms and muscular riffs creating a dense framework upon which the guitarist lays down more of his incredibly adventurous six-string embroidery. The last musical interlude, “Phileas,” treads closely to the ambient work of Brian Eno, or maybe Stephan Micus. Although most metal-flakes tuned out and turned away from Spheres long before “Demise of Time” had a chance to properly assault their speakers, the loss is theirs, not ours. The song is a grand experiment of what could only be called “math metal,” a cacophonic blitzkrieg of sound and fury that melds rapid-fire signature changes with crystalline string-bending and a hurricane of tumultuous rhythms and blustery vocals.

Sadly out-of-print for years, Spheres has been resurrected by the good folks of Poland’s Metal Mind label, the disc distributed by our friends at MVD Audio in the United States. A limited edition of 2,000 copies pressed onto a gold disc, including a booklet with informative liner notes and song lyrics, this deluxe reissue of Spheres adds four bonus tracks, including remix versions of “Soul Search” and “Demise of Time” that emphasize Mameli’s freelance six-string work and bring the keyboards to the front of the mix, emphasizing the band’s Killing Joke influences.

Live versions of “Mind Reflections” and “Multiple Beings” showcase Pestilence’s Godzilla-strength performance chops, the band bludgeoning the audience with a blistering drone that sounds like the ass-end of an F-14 Tomcat. By the time that Pestilence recorded Spheres, the band had clearly jumped onto a higher musical plane. Mameli’s fretwork was both more nuanced and literate as well as heavier, diamond hard. Drummer Marco Foddis hits the skins with the finesse of a jazzman and the power of a jackhammer, and his matured lyrical abilities veered sharply away from the stuffy death metal confines of doom-and-gloom to explore themes of psychology, philosophy and the cosmos. Bassist Jeroen Paul Thesseling is as creative in his realm as Jaco Pastorius was in his, while guitarist Patrick Uterwijk is a crazy, inventive player. 

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Altogether, the four created a metallic masterpiece that, although disdained and discarded at the time – Spheres reportedly sold about 25% of the copies of any of the band’s previous three titles – the album’s stature has nevertheless grown through the years. Pestilence’s experimental metal paved the way for modern explorers like Nile and Meshuggah, and deserves to be respected and revered for the groundbreaking effort that Pestilence risked its career to lay down on tape. Yes, with the genre-expanding Spheres, Voidvod’s The Outer Limits, Atheist’s Elements, and Cynic’s Focus, 1993 was a great year for metal! (MVD Audio/Metal Mind Records, released 2007)

Review originally published by the Trademark of Quality (TMQ) blog, 2007 

 

Archive Review: Realm's Endless War (1988/2006)

From jump street, Realm’s 1988 debut album Endless War comes galloping out of your speakers like the Four Horsemen of some alternative, leather-clad Apocalypse, grabbing your ears and smacking your pointy lil’ head against the pavement until you give up your lunch money. That’s lofty praise, to be sure, but from the opening chords of the album’s title track ‘til the final musical explosion that Realm titled “Poisoned Minds,” Endless War is a high-octane kick-in-the-groin with the dreaded steel-toed work boot (size 12, I think). Part of the MVD Audio reissue series of classic Roadrunner Records titles from the golden age of heavy metal, Endless Realm kicks serious ass in every way that you could imagine (967 if you’re actually counting).

Roaring out of the unlikely environs of Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Realm took the early ‘80s thrash-metal revolution that had already infected the West Coast seriously. More so, these jugheads took it PERSONALLY as well, figuring, I guess, that they could tear down buildings and deflower virginal young maidens as well as Hetfield, Mustaine or the assorted (sordid?) mopes from Testament, or maybe even better. Fey Cali metalheads aside, Realm was formed in 1985 by vocalist Mark Antoni, guitarists Takis Kinis and Paul Laganowski, bassist Steve Post and drummer Mike Olson. After circulating a couple of demo tapes around the growing metal tape-trading underground, and selling a few thousand copies out of their collective car trunks and by mail order (back in the pre-web daze), Realm signed a with the young Roadrunner Records label in 1988.

Realm's Endless Wars Endless War

With Endless War, the Realm guys figured that they had built a better metal mousetrap, and I’d have to agree with them (and not only ‘cause they’re currently holding my dog Mugsy hostage…you’ll be home soon boy, I promise!). In Mark Antoni, Realm had an unusually talented vocalist (for a thrash band, that is), an old-school warbler that soared rather than growled, hitting the notes high and low like Dickinson from Iron Maiden or Savatage’s Jon Oliva. Antoni struts and swaggers through the mix like some sort of spotlight-clad Greek deity while the rest of the band knocks down the riffs and rhythms with reckless glee.

Here’s the other unusual thing about Realm – even a casual listen to Endless War displays technical chops more akin to contemporary prog-metal outfits than twenty-year-old thrash-metal bands. The guys in Realm, particularly guitarists Laganowski and Kinis, bring a big dose of melodic technicality to the music, refusing to trade skills for power and vice versa. There are a lot of progressive elements in Realm’s sound, from the intricate guitar interplay to the careful rhythmic construction. Drummer Olson can blister the skins with the best of ‘em, but he can also follow Post’s rhythmic lead and deliver subtle flourishes that fill out the band’s sound nicely.

Progressive Metal

It all comes down to the songs though, don’t it, which in the case of Realm’s Endless War, are a breathless mix of traditional metal construct, futuristic flights of fancy (a la Voivod), classic thrash-and-speed-metal elements (think early Metallica or Megadeth) and an undeniable progressive undercurrent (Uriah Heep, Rush). Lyrically, with words mostly penned by guitarist Kinis, Realm follows an artistic path similar to heavy metal colleagues like Nuclear Assault, Riot, or Intruder, mixing socially-conscious story-songs with fantasy-influenced wordplay. It’s the sheer sonic power of the material on Endless War that keeps Realm in high favor among metal collectors, though, from the unrelenting search-and-destroy mission that is “All Heads Will Turn To the Hunt” to the gentle-like-a-sledgehammer Zeppisms of “Root of Evil” or the soul crushing, eardrum-busting, liver-shaking sturm und drang of “Poisoned Minds.” To further turn the world on its head, Realm dared to deliver a red hot cover of the Beatles “Eleanor Rigby,” reinventing the classic rock chestnut in a way that not even John Lennon’s mother would recognize.

In the long run, Realm didn’t have the spark in ‘em to carry on much further than Endless War. They released an appropriately vicious follow-up, Suiciety, in 1990, which has also been reissued by MVD Audio with the entire luxury package, and the band reportedly recorded an unreleased third album a couple of years later. As I’ve told you all before, however, the early ’90s proved to be a sodden bloody killing floor for all things metal, and it wasn’t until later in the decade when boy bands suddenly ruled the earth that shaggy-headed teenaged miscreants (much like the Reverend when he was a young Neanderthal) went looking for more meaningful musical experiences, finding Realm’s fine pair of albums in the process.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Regardless of your tastes in metal (I like mine barbequed, personally), if you still get shivers at the sound of clashing guitars and are drawn to rampaging drumbeats like a flea-bitten hound at the sound of a dog whistle, you owe it to yourself to dig up a copy of Realm’s Endless War. Provided a proper reissuing with scalpel-sharp 24-bit remastering, a high-quality shiny gold disc, original art, an attractive booklet with lots of words and song lyrics (and liner notes from guitarist Takis Kinis) in a limited edition of 2k, you’d better find your copy today. The Reverend doth decree it! (MVD Audio/Metal Mind Records, released 2006)

Review originally published by the Trademark of Quality (TMQ) blog, 2006

Archive Review: Xentrix's Shattered Existence (1989/2006)

I wrote previously about MVD Audio, the CD end of the Music Video Distributors empire, coming to an agreement with Roadrunner Records to reissue nearly two dozen of the label’s classic ‘80s metal titles in grand new limited editions on gold discs with original cover art, liner notes, lyrics and everything. Having received a number of these groovy reissue discs from the good folks at MVD, and after listening to them repeatedly over the past couple of months (between my stories on teevee and, well, that job thing), now it’s time to write a few words about these mutts.

U.K. thrashmasters Xentrix (pronounced “Zen Tricks” for you Hooked On Phonics™ types), unremarkably, began life as a garden-variety Metallica cover band known about town as Sweet Vengeance. That they chose to channel Metallica is not surprising, really – British bands struggled during the late ‘80s to define their own particular brand of thrash-and-speed-metal chops and many of ‘em sounded like Lars and crew. By the time of the band’s signing with the fledgling Roadrunner label in 1988, based on the strength of their four-song demo tape, the band had changed its name to Xentrix and had already begun to develop its own voice.

Xentrix’s Shattered Existence

Released in 1989, Shattered Existence is one raucous mother of a debut disc. The band kicks the amps up to “11” before declaring “No Compromise,” and then they kept the damn tape rolling long past the point where their collective ears began to bleed. “Dark Enemy” offers up a literal human sacrifice in the form of guitarist Kristian Havard’s hands – surely he lost them after performing the song’s caustic fretboard runs, while “Bad Blood” expanded the band’s musical palette, displaying melodic elements alongside machine-gun drumming, courtesy of the bombastic Dennis Gasser. Vocalist/guitarist and band founder Chris Astley is a capable frontman, his vox sounding like the same shade of gray as James Hetfield’s, snapping and growling like a rabid pup above the razor-sharp mix. The rest of Shattered Existence mines similar thrash/speed-metal turf, alternating between Iommi-inspired heavy riffing and lightning-fast, virtually blinding lead runs.

This MVD reissue of Shattered Existence tacks on three songs from the band’s ill-fated (but energetic) 1990 Ghostbusters EP. The three-song vinyl was released as a stopgap to satisfy new Xentrix’s fans until the release of the For Whose Advantage? album later that year. The band’s inspired cover of Ray Parker Jr’s movie theme song was met with threats of a legal smackdown, however, and the label was forced to recall the EP from the stores. The episode set Xentrix back a bit, but they regrouped and released three more albums for Roadrunner with Astley at the helm, sadly experiencing diminishing returns with each one, proving that they had pretty much spent their creative allowance on Shattered Existence.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Met with commercial indifference in a fluctuating market that had begun to favor grunge bands and vacuous pop, Xentrix dropped its founding frontman and released one last album, 1996’s Scourge, with a new singer and guitarist before disappearing off the heavy metal map. Shattered Existence remains as a classic example of ‘80s-era thrash-metal, however, a solid collection of songs with performances that transcended the musician’s combined skills. With old-school thrashers like Testament and Exodus still kicking the ball around and digging up new fans from beneath the blood-soaked sod of the music industry, Xentrix deserves another day in the sun... (MVD Audio/Metal Mind Records, released 2006)

Review originally published by Trademark of Quality (TMQ) blog, 2006