Albums of 12/6/24

The most interesting releases of the week!

L’appel Du Vide is an independently released debut album from Polish black metal outfit Kir. The music on this 30-minute full-length consists of fairly standard muscular melodic black metal, with thick guitars taking the lead, vocals that hit somewhere between growls and yells, a refreshingly clear bass that offers support or counter-melody with equal effectiveness, and drums that could have been louder in the mix. The album starts off with a couple of fast-paced tracks before taking a minor turn into something more introspective.

The random ambient noise at the end of “Znow” seems jarring at first, but serves as a good transition to the second half of the album, which operates at a slower, more brooding pace. This sound veers towards blackened death. Kir wrote good melodies that simultaneously stay in your head and effectively convey the misery that the band’s expressing. Fans of Behemoth will enjoy.

Drymarchon‘s release sounds exactly like what you’d expect from an independently released one-man death/thrash debut called “Die In A Fire”. This originally came out in January, but it’s being re-released in physical format so I get to talk about it again. This is some sloppy lo-fi junk with catchy riffs, high energy, and an infectious sense of gory fun.

On Mori In Igne, you get short, snappy songs that effectively use the basement-band-sound approach to create something interesting. But nothing gets in the way of the riffs. The beginning of “F.Y.T.A.D.W.T,” for example, consists of a straightforward, rumbling guitar attack with as few notes as possible. The guitar solo in the middle of the track takes a similar approach, focusing more on snarl than on snaz. A short 25 minutes later and it’s gone. This is a good one for people who like their mosh pit experience as direct and to-the-point as possible.

This needlessly-complicated-to-search-for work of music is the second EP that Burn Down Eden released this year, following an EP called Dismal that came out earlier this year. Epiphany was released on Seek & Strike. The two EPs form one full-length when listened to together, and that will come out next January. This makes it very difficult to find information on the EP specifically and not the full-length, but this will only be a problem for a short amount of time. Burn Down Eden have a DYI, punk-infused death metal sound. Their song structures are fairly cookie cutter. This EP doesn’t explore new territory. But Burn Down Eden gives tight performances that makes you root for them, and transforms the unpretentious nature of their songwriting into something that sticks with you and conveys the band’s enthusiasm for their music.

The obvious comparison for Burn Down Eden is Lamb of God, and that works well enough to discribe their sound. The way they play, it almost doesn’t matter what notes they wrote. At the end of my first listen of Epiphany, all I could remember about the music was that it was heavy, it was fast, and I was energized. As it turns out, the riffs are entertaining enough, but the solos, breakdowns, and passages where band members felt like showing off are where the music really shines. I’ll probably talk about this again when the full album actually comes out as one release. Burn Down Eden have a wrecking-ball energy that just works.