Death Metal has a complicated relationship with innovation. The most extreme fringes of brutality and extremity have been reached years and years ago. Apexes have been reached in the pursuit of primitivism, barbarity, technicality and progressivism alike and it is rare that a Death Metal band can serve up something truly new. Even an act like Horrendous, who recently produced a very good album in their own right, is most likely just reshuffling ideas around that we already know and are accepted into the canon of Death Metal. Tomb Mold had this issue for a while themselves. While I would argue that they always were the spearhead of this new wave of Death Metal bands, an album release schedule too tight for their own good led me to proclaim that their albums, while very, very good, never quite reached the potential that I saw in the band. Their last Demo already gave us a sneak peak that the band is ready to peer into the most abstract depths of their musicianship and finally deliver the masterpiece that I felt they had in them.
What we get on The Enduring Spirit is certifiably fantastic, but I cannot say that I could have foreseen the direction Tomb Mold would take with this album – or that anyone could have, really. Some of it has been foreshadowed on their last Demo, with how the band tapped into material both more progressive, heady and psychedelic, but this new album utilizes the dichotomy between different textures, tonalities, timbres and moods like I haven´t heard a metal album do in quite a while – or at least doing so successfully. The album starts with the usual and expected barrage of Death Metal aggression, even if there is maybe an increased focus on single note riffs. This might be intentional foreshadowing or just a consequence of writing material that is so cohesive, despite being so diverse. Soon, the album manages to develop into a multitude of appearance, most notably the chorus tinges clean guitar sections that are as inspired by the 80s as they are out of time. Many sections on this album are in major related keys and modes, producing an unusual atmosphere for Death Metal – The Enduring Spirit is relaxing, even hopeful at times. The band delves into modes of expression usually reserved for Post Metal, with how harmony is a deciding factor, but yet never actually becomes a Post Metal band, as the material manages to be graspable and concrete even at their most harmonically rich.
Drastic mood shifts are nothing new and have been attempted by bands before. Usually, the shift is not only drastic in mood or emotional content, but rather the shift is intended to be jarring. It is an approach I often do enjoy, but metal often seems to struggle with more fluid, logical composition that manages to transport ideas from one space to the next. Tomb Mold manages to do so by bridging consonance with extended harmony, smoothly transitioning from consonance to dissonance in an almost Neoclassical way, but doing so using the vocabulary of mostly Death Metal with hints of Prog and Jazz. Little motifs get brought over, melodic ideas get transposed and recontextualized and strung together to songs that are not only more than the sum of their parts, but truly progressive.
