Fear of change is natural. Your favorite restaurant changes its menu, or your go-to snack revises its formula and you have to figure out whether the new taste works for you. With bands, a natural evolution tends to be that the more popular they get, the more they have to consider how to cater to all of their fans, and potentially new ones. Imperial Triumphant have gained notoriety over their last few albums, with one of the key components over their works being a fluid approach to change — an album-by-album approach to writing, if you will. When Spirit of Ecstasy arrived, I simultaneously thought it was great and that Imperial Triumphant had arrived at a creative dead that started with 2016’s Inceste EP. Spirit of Ecstasy was Imperial Triumphant at their most obtuse, freshly signed to one of the largest metal labels around, yet still as completely inaccessible as they could be. It’s no surprise, then, that Goldstar turns out to be their most accessible album yet, an evolution in sound that always has me weary because so many bands don’t know how to make that transition and come out on the other end sounding or feeling like the same band. However, while I say accessible, this is in relative terms — Goldstar is a death metal album that is really fucking weird, just not nearly as weird as what came before. So let its urban smog fill your lungs; feel refreshed in a way only Imperial Triumphant can offer.
The main point of accessibility on Goldstar is that it centers around Zachary Ezrin‘s guitar leads more than I can recall hearing since debut album Abominamentvm. Already in the first whammy-abusing track, “Eye of Mars”, the music cycles through previously established influences like Deathspell Omega and Voivod, with Ezrin‘s vocals sounding closer than ever to Behemoth‘s Nergal. In other spots, Meshuggah-like rhythms lurch (“Gomorrah Noveaux”, “Pleasuredome” ) but quickly shift to aggressive or dissonant riffs that pull the songs forward. Slayer is also a potential point of reference as Goldstar features a guest spot from long-time drummer Dave Lombardo, who supplies his talents in “Pleasuredome”. This is not to say that Steve Blanco‘s bass and Kenny Grohowski‘s drums get sidelined. There are still eight other songs where they break the surface to create the otherworldly noir atmosphere that Imperial Triumphant has built their style on. “Lexington Delirium” is a perfect example of this, its guitar tremolo runs maintaining a high intensity while drums and bass dance around them. Colin Marston‘s bittersweet mix expertly places the performers so they complement each other, while making sure the crunch of the guitar is always present. Likewise, Arthur Rizk‘s mastering pulls the dissonance and crunch of everything together without sacrificing dynamics. I would have liked Grohowski‘s drums to have just a little bit more punch, but Goldstar is an album where you can easily pull up the volume and have a great time.
Goldstar is packed with ideas. At 38 minutes, it’s the shortest album since their debut. Imperial Triumphant, thankfully, has not edited out, though, their quirky sense of humor. “Hotel Sphinx” (the name potentially inspired by a futuristic luxury hotel that didn’t pass the concept stage) takes an appreciation of Stanley Kubrick and makes it overt. Additionally, its main melody finds base in “Sarabande” from George Frideric Händel‘s Keyboard Suite No.4 in D Minor, converting it to a trippy guitar tremolo before breaking down to a cheesy synth warbling the same melody (like Kubrick did with the main theme of A Clockwork Orange). The album then pulls a bait and switch with a ridiculously intense grind track and the titular commercial jingle. “Pleasuredome” has a samba breakdown, complete with dancers in the back of its music video. One of the best drummers in metal, Tomas Haake (Meshuggah), guests on the album but only provides his voice for spoken word sections. Most importantly, for all these quirky details, none of them break Goldstar‘s pacing because all of them are well integrated into the main course of jazzy death metal. With this being the album’s greatest strength, I already see it making waves among those who were on the fence about Imperial Triumphant. Even if it doesn’t have the murky noir darkness of Vile Luxury, or the epic moving machinery of Alphaville, Goldstar makes a case for itself in this discography as a culmination of experience during the Menegroth years. It condenses the music into something more streamlined and less abstract, like the transition Pyrrhon did last year with the excellent Exhaust. While the transition is a bit more uneven here, and Goldstar is not currently my favorite pack of Imperial Triumphant, it might just properly kill me in time.
