ALBUM REVIEW: Excelsis – Isle Of The Cross
Every year in a small town called Cooper’s Hill, just outside Gloucester in the United Kingdom, people gather for the singular purpose of chasing a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down an incredibly steep hill. Aiming to catch the cheese, which can reach speeds of up to 70 mph, before it reaches the bottom of the hill, competitors are frequently severely injured by tripping, falling, and tumbling down the incline. What has the Cooper’s Hill cheese roll got to do with ISLE OF THE CROSS‘ new full-length, Excelsis, you ask? Simple. Je Schneider’s latest release is an idiosyncratic, fast-paced, confusing stumble of a record, grasping for something eternally just out of its reach, liable to cause injury (mostly to a listener’s sanity) and entirely devoted to cheese.
ISLE OF THE CROSS self describes as ‘progressive orchestral technical death metal infused with avant-garde symphonic/melodic redemptive extremities’, and those certainly are all words. And Excelsis does include all these elements, in the same way that if you took every item out of your fridge and put them between two slices of bread, you could call it a sandwich and be right on a technicality.
Opener Sacrifice gallops with stuttering (and clearly programmed) kicks, growled whispers and distant soaring vocals working around the technical prog riffs. Rising synths and barked MESHUGGAH style vocals phase in and out of the syncopated instrumentals. Tartarus stomps, swinging through sub-layers of smooth bass and splashy cymbals, with a weird middle-eight break into close, bright acoustic strumming and world-music instrumentation, peppered with bursts of frantic pant pipes.
The album’s title track is all clattering snares, angelic choral vocals and strings, evoking memories of Final Fantasy end-of-level-boss soundtracking. Just when it seems to settle, a three way guitar, synth, and harpsichord solo battle engages, threatening to ruin all music forever. The Wolf, Pt. I. Invocation broods with backmasked, effects drenched vocals, noise layers and tolling bells. The movement’s second part (Sanctuary) drips with overblown prog shredding, staccato vocals, and a faux deathcore breakdown.
Stars starts with melancholic soft woodwinds, clean vocals indulging in the overly saccharine 14-year-old’s diary lyrical lovemaking of lines like “my love I vowed my heart to you” and “on that day my soul belonged to you” before guitars worthy of a softcore porn soundtrack takes flight. Empyrean is a rush of manic synth and constant double kick work, stuttering breakdowns and overworked bombast (and an overblown organ solo for good measure) pitching the track into the realms of DRAGONFORCE-lite.
Listeners will no doubt be exhausted by the time they reach the remaining five tracks of an inarguably bloated and overly-long record. Reviews like this are difficult to write. Clearly ISLE OF THE CROSS have written this album with vision, dedication and love. Je Schneider is a canny composer – there are arrangements and riffs here that, in isolation, work well, and it’s a record suffused with ambition, combining instruments and elements from a range of genres well.
But for everything Excelsis gets right, it gets three things wrong. Tracks often try to do too much at once, dense layering feeling claustrophobic and not allowing any instruments or elements to breathe and resonate. During the ‘heavy’ sections, production creaks under the weight of sliders being pushed to ‘loudest’, swallowing whole any subtleties and leaving tone in the mud. While the record’s toying with time signatures is impressive, they frequently feel awkward or forced, disrupting flow.
Fans of fromage may find an engaging and earnest concept album with a wealth of interesting instrumentation while tumbling down the hill of Excelsis. For the rest, a cheese inflicted injury surely awaits. ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’.
Rating: 3/10
Excelsis is out now via Rockshot Records.
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