ALBUM REVIEW: The Gate Of The Veiled Beyond – Typhonian
Germany’s TYPHONIAN may not have an extensive back catalogue to their name, but what little music they have produced has helped establish this Ulm-based quintet as a band with plenty of promise. Their debut album, 2018’s Beneath The Streams Of Life, had a dense and weighty old school death metal sound that was reminiscent of BOLT THROWER and DISMEMBER at times and featured some solid tracks that laid some powerful foundations for the band. In the six years between that album and its follow-up The Gate Of The Veiled Beyond, the band’s sound has morphed towards a tighter, more melody-driven and decidedly more adventurous one, with this allowing them to shed the OSDM tag and develop a sound that, although varied, isn’t defined by its influences as much as their debut was.
The spartan and ethereal Celestial Salvation acts as a short instrumental that sets an atmospheric tone for the first song proper Cosmic Throne, a track that blends melodic death thrash with subtle progressiveness, creating a sound that is simultaneously angular and immersive. It lurches between razor sharp hooks and doom-laden passages, covering a lot of ground musically and setting the creative standard for the rest of the album. Primal Deceptive Light brings back the lighter, cleaner guitar sound that featured on the opening track, and utilises it effectively, creating a delicate opening motif that contrasts markedly with the meaty, rhythmic death metal that quickly takes over. Throaty vocals, tight guitar work and cavernous drums make for a forceful sound that embraces a punchier, more accessible side in amongst its ferocious moments, leaning more prominently into melodeath than its predecessor.
Crimson Rivers introduces death-doom into the mix, with imposing slower passages developing a monolithic sound immediately, before altering towards an abrasive brand of death metal with grating riffs, monstrous vocals, frenetic drums and an authoritative bassline, showcasing a bleaker style than the focused and acerbic feel that has dominated this record so far. This darker, denser style is expanded upon in greater depth on The Gatekeeper, a thick and brooding offering with a muscular undercurrent and dramatic flourishes, notably in the vocal performance and the excellent guitars, being arguably one of this album’s most visceral songs, with impenetrable, cacophonous bursts of aggression tempering the slicker moments perfectly.
Beginning on a sea of shimmering ambience, Towards The Chamber Of The Omnipresent Mind abruptly lunges back into a caustic slab of death metal just when you think that a new musical dimension is entering the mix. Luckily, this is a really impressive and chaotic take on the album’s core sound, with demented touches and blistering intensity standing in stark contrast to the polished, catchy licks that are spread throughout this song, with the overall sound sitting somewhere between the preceding tracks and that of Primal Deceptive Light. A Glimpse At The Starless Ocean shifts significantly towards a blackened death metal sound, with a solid emphasis on the black metal influences, from the IMMORTAL-esque intro to the hypnotic guitar rhythms and tortured, howling vocals, injecting a darkly epic quality into the music that lends it an engrossing, cinematic aspect, with the soaring melodies that eventually rise to the surface turning this into something even more grandiose.
Cath’un – Gate Of The Veiled Beyond, an extremely ambitious and sprawling closing effort, takes up close to 20 minutes of the album’s runtime and makes full use of every second of it, right from the crystalline guitars that it starts upon through its many twists and turns, which incorporate the best elements of this album’s sound, from atmospheric interludes to belligerent and rabid dissonance. Where a lot of tracks this gargantuan in scope often end up being meandering messes of pointless riffs, everything here seems well thought out and considered, ducking and weaving from one fantastic passage to the next seamlessly, and even allowing for a lot of new elements, notably spacey synths, to enter the mix and add yet another brilliant layer to this song, without feeling as though they have been inserted just for the sake of it, providing one more stunning string to TYPHONIAN‘s songwriting bow. It’s an amazing way to cap the album off, and boasts some of the best musicianship on the whole record at various points within it.
If the sharp and slick melodic death metal sound that lay at the heart of this album had been the sole musical focus, this would have been a solid record that nonetheless wouldn’t have made as much of an impact as it could have. It would have been great to see the band explore the styles that each new track hinted at in its opening moments in greater depth, whether that be death-doom, progressive elements or even a more atmospheric sound, as it would have made for a more varied sound. Luckily, the areas where this album excels, notably its magnificent final track, the morose blackened edge of A Glimpse At The Starless Ocean, and some of the more experimental and frenetic sections, all help to elevate these songs and make each one feel a lot more distinct from the others, turning a decent album into an impressive one. This is an album that has seen TYPHONIAN begin to flesh out their own distinct sound, and if they continue down the feral, prog-tinged route with their future music, they will have a winning songwriting formula on their hands.
Rating: 8/10
The Gate Of The Veiled Beyond is out now via Transcending Obscurity Records.
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