Technical Brutal Death Metal. A genre descriptor that should elicit joy from fans of both facets of Death Metal: combining speed and precision with nasty necksnapping grooves, it’s a sub-subgenre that on paper has the tools needed to be one of the best styles of Extreme Metal to immerse yourself in. Yet, somehow, it more often than not falls flat. Bands such as Unfathomable Ruination and Hideous Divinity manage to make compelling songs in this style, but bands such as Demiurgon and Maze of Sothoth make tepid, lifeless blastfests that are interchangeable with one another, and don’t provide a sense of identity to their albums. Enter Arborescence of Wrath. This confusingly named band, featuring members of Origin and Marduk, elects to play in this style of highly contentious Death Metal. The real question remains: Is this debut worth your time, or is this another act that fails to ascend to the heights needed to stand above the competition?
Unfortunately, this album lacks variation. This is due to multiple factors: the unchanging pace of nothing but a blastfest, and the vocals of Origin‘s frontman Jason Keyser. Inferno is fast, and sadly doesn’t do much other than prove it can play really goddamn fast, not unlike a band such as Brain Drill, a band in the Technical Death Metal sphere that is much maligned for “playing fast for the sake of playing fast” instead of mixing things up to keep the albums interesting. The band’s technical chops are undeniable across the album: the drumming, riffs, and solos are quite impressive and display incredible bursts of aggression that I’d like to hear more often across more Death Metal albums. This brings me to my second point of contention: the vocals. Origin is a band that can play very fast, and has some pretty impressive vocal delivery at times, but on this album, Jason really exhibits the shortcomings of Origin’s vocals: the monotonal delivery. Never does he mix styles up between his very uniform growl or standard higher-pitched shriek for a more interesting vocal delivery. It makes the songs nigh indistinguishable from each other, and it’s quite telling when the most impressive song on your album has a beautiful classical opera sample to start the song off, as in “Holier Than You,” the album’s major highlight. Overall, I’m disappointed. With the pedigree of musicians in this group, I would have thought Arborescence of Wrath would have managed to make more interesting Death Metal in this style than they did. I can only hope album two will not be as painfully average as Inferno.
