In every field of classification, you have your splitters and your lumpers, to use Darwin’s evergreen terminology. Let’s demonstrate with melodic death metal. The lumper is busy trying to put melodeath into a box with death metal or power metal. The splitter is talking of Gothenburg, of Finnish melancholia, of power metal inflected and core and a dozen other things. On arriving at self-professed old school melodeath act Veriteras and their second full-length, The Dark Horizon, the splitter would rub their hands together for there’s something interesting here.
Half of Veriteras’ sound is very like Dissection with vicious yet hummable tremolo melodies layered over double-bass abuse. Opening track “Certainty” starts with a fine example of this. The other half owes more to the stated influences of early In Flames and Kalmah. Think big emotive leads with a hint of folkiness and a whiff of power metal. These two halves flow into each other in The Dark Horizon to create a continuous onslaught that evokes several earlier strains of melodeath without ever feeling like an imitation of any one band. In other words, Veriteras have found an appealing niche of their own. Unfortunately, that turns into a weakness as well as a strength, as they just don’t leave that niche on The Dark Horizon. It’s all onslaught all the time. Songs blur into each other like I’m ten beers deep into a tasting session and I find myself longing for an acoustic interlude like I’ve never longed for one before in my life.
The short version of this review would be I like the songs on The Dark Horizon more than I like The Dark Horizon. Happily, that is an easy fix if Veriteras want to go there — expand the sound and mix it up. They’ve shown the talent and the vision needed to make good melodic death metal. I now look forward to the next Veriteras album and seeing whether they can split themselves away from the pack and create something genre-leading.
