Riff mark: you’re listening to the whole song whether you
like it or not
Five years following a debut and a label drop, an eternity of
atheistic declarations and tonal deconstructions barely contained, Immolation
roar through the rusted bars of the lion’s den with one of the greatest death
metal albums of its decade. A bold,
arguable declarative, but I’ve listened to
Here in After a hundred times (preferably through headphones; you need to
hear both guitars pulled apart to separate earpieces) and I still marvel at the
exhausting, deliberate care taken in each riff, each song, and the collection
of all essences that went into this anti-creation. Guitar dissonance and
irregular drumming patterns somehow pledging allegiance to coexist under
strenuous tensions, time signatures agonizingly stretching an extra beat as
though the torture of one measure is unending, all techniques are of one
uniform, diverse minions shedding backgrounds for the common cause of the devil
itself. Robert Vigna is the ambassador of the formation, whose ability to
translate pure agony into a guitar solo is a gift traded for a soul. Check out
those distant cries opening Christ’s Cage,
one of the most remarkable endings to a death metal record, ever. As good as
the best Morbid Angel album, soaring past geographically and
stylistically-neighboring Incantation, Here
In After is a mandatory log in the 90’s extreme, a supreme evil, truly
confident of its A-list majesty in the soon-to-be swelling genre.
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