The Crypts of the Unknown harbors many festered treasures. Have you ever come across an album that you enjoy, but seemingly no other human in existence knows about it? Or maybe an album that ticks all the boxes in a style that doesn’t get a lot of love? Oh, and of course, you’ve found this album long after it would have mattered to help the band spread the word… or perhaps it’s just your dirty little secret…
Whatever the case, we here at Goat Review prefer to air our loves to the world, to open the gates of our corroded Crypts to the masses. Today, join us as Scuttlegoat reminisces on Capilla Ardiente‘s 2019 release The Siege. It may not be perfect, but how would you know?
The Gator brought up a good point the other day when reviewing a progressive melodeath record: too many bands (and listeners alike) equate length with complexity and mistake, sometimes willingly, a massive scope for progressive songwriting. If that logic held true then a lot of doom metal would qualify, which should showcase how flawed that logic is — you can simply repeat the same riff for a long time and you get a song. Often this is by design, however. Be it to reach a trancelike hypnotic state or, in the case of epic doom metal, to serve as a backdrop for the heightened vocal drama that is dished out by vocalists who are often sadly not as technically proficient as they are committed to the bit. It would be hard to call any of this progressive, but this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to make progressive doom metal.
Capilla Ardiente are about the only band that I can think of that managed the tightrope walk of making progressive epic doom metal. The band is connected to other greats of the Chilean epic doom scene, mainly through bassist Claudio Botarro Neira, who plays in the much more well known Procession, whose much more riff-oriented approach does not offer the same room for exploration that Capilla Ardiente does. On this album, Botarro Neira gets to play fretless bass and even use it for extended solo sections. Luckily, these never devolve into masturbatory noodling and always feel like the songs build towards them in satisfactory ways. This is due to how disciplined The Siege is with structure. New material will frequently come about and the song structures don’t always take the easiest path to a climactic high point. Instead, much of the album defies the structural expectations of the genre which heightens the effect of choruses, solos or other musical climaxes.
All of the structural trickery would mean very little if these climaxes didn’t deliver, of course but every member of Capilla Ardiente performs on the highest level. Choruses always feel like the most logical conclusion to what came before, and they are as memorable as they are mournful and powerful. The guitar work is creative in unique ways, often breaking up simple riffs by inserting little flourishes into them without telegraphing them outright. At times, there is even a modern influence to the guitars. Riffs skirt subtly by death and black metal, like the broken arpeggios in “The Open Arms, the Open Wounds”, and how later riffs stomp and march onwards. Again, it is not a single element that makes The Siege work and I wish to not sell you on the album with a simple elevator pitch. The Siege feels massive and epic, much more so than most epic doom and the band could only really achieve this with the progressive songwriting that at first glance might have seemed antithetical.
