ALBUM REVIEW: Antimony – Ashen Horde
In April 1876 the newly-married British lawyer Charles Bravo fell mysteriously ill. He was dead within days, the doctors declaring that he had been a victim of antimony poisoning. The case remains one of the world’s great mysteries, touched upon by everyone from Agatha Christie to Alan Moore, and now by the progressive blackened death metal band ASHEN HORDE for their fourth full-length album, which takes its name from the very same poison that is said to have killed Bravo.
As with many concept albums – particularly in extreme metal where vocals are more often screamed than sung – it isn’t all that easy to follow the story told across Antimony’s nine tracks (we’ll get to the bonus later). Many of the titles seem to refer to suspects in the case; The Consort is presumably Bravo’s wife Florence, The Physician most likely Dr James Manby Gully, with whom Florence had an affair prior to her marriage to Bravo, and The Courtesan is said to be a look at the victim’s mistress. But while the grim and knotty details of the case may lend themselves to the complexity and atmosphere of the music at hand, there comes a point where it must take a back seat to the question of whether this album is actually any good.
Fortunately, it is. Much like the murder itself there is a lot to disentangle here, with most of the songs rolling well past the five-minute mark as the band weave together complex collections of ideas that rarely sit still for very long. A blackened blast one minute, a spidery riff the next, even a few clean vocal passages that bring a heightened degree of theatrics to proceedings – all these and more ensure that Antimony makes for a significantly varied and unpredictable experience, and by extension they help to make most of this record’s sizable 51-minute runtime pass by a lot quicker than you might expect it to.
Given all that’s going on it can be a challenge to come away from Antimony with much more than a feeling of general unsettledness rather than any clear memories of specific moments or songs, which some may argue is actually better. There’s just something undeniably creepy about this record – an angular, dissonant and sinister atmosphere that lingers long after the album has finished. Harsh vocalist Stevie also brings a lot to the table in this regard, his primarily blackened deliveries often supported by an uglier guttural that sits just beneath them in the mix, almost like an malevolent presence lurking just behind the scenes of the story in question.
As mentioned, there’s enough going on here that ASHEN HORDE don’t really struggle for their listeners’ attention, but there is perhaps a degree of fatigue that might start to set in towards the end. Antimony is obviously quite a difficult listening experience, and 51 minutes will be asking quite a lot of the casual listener in particular. The bonus track is also definitely unnecessary – a cover of Knives by THERAPY coming after a good 49 minutes of the album has already passed. It’s not so much an issue of execution as the band do well to put their own deathy spin on it, and there is an argument that it fits with the themes of the record to an extent, but it also can’t help but break the immersion as it pulls listeners out of 1876 and plonks them somewhere far closer to the track’s 1990s origins.
Those issues aside, there is no denying that Antimony is an interesting listen. If nothing else it points people towards a particularly fascinating story, and like that story it leaves its listeners feeling unsettled, uncomfortable and eager to spend a bit more time pulling at its many twisted threads.
Rating: 7/10
Antimony is set for release on January 27th via Transcending Obscurity Records.
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