ALBUM REVIEW: Intensities – Plague Rider
In the ten years since the release of their self-titled debut album, Newcastle’s PLAGUE RIDER have altered both their sound and style drastically. Where that album, and the EP that followed it – 2015’s Paroxysm – leant much more heavily into a technical and catchy death thrash sound, it wasn’t until 2018, when the band released Rhizome, that listeners began to hear the distinct shift towards a much more experimental and chaotic sound that took the high musicianship and skill of the preceding two records and applied it to a much harsher and more visceral take on death metal. The band’s latest album, Intensities, is aptly titled, and pushes them even further down this interesting and avant-garde path.
Temporal Fixation, with its disjointed hooks and sludgy bassline, is a brilliantly avant-garde start to the record, meandering between cleaner, jazzy moments and much more acerbic, chaotic ones with grating rhythms, thunderous drums and caustic vocals all contributing to an unpredictable and unhinged sound that still manages to incorporate some subtle melodic touches and punchy hooks in amongst the more frenetic sections. An Executive serves as a far chunkier and more groove-laden offering than the opener, although the overarching dissonance remains at the forefront of the sound as the song progresses, with the guitar and vocals especially taking on a jarring, feral edge that makes this feel even more visceral and aggressive.
Modern Serf takes the biting discordance of the first two tracks and the muscular undercurrent of the previous one and creates a sinister, bellicose take on both, shifting abruptly from mid-paced passages through to sections built around cacophonous, borderline grindcore intensity, with the vocals similarly moving between acidic snarls and weighty gutturals to add to the eclectic and searing effect of the music. Toil, a short but utterly blistering slab of grind-inspired death metal, doubles down on the monstrous musical approach but also acts as a great segue between the album’s two halves despite the fact it possesses an identical formula.
The Refrain, a near ten-minute behemoth, is initially perhaps the most straightforward piece of death metal on the whole album, with huge, powerful rhythms and far catchier guitar work. But it very quickly descends into the savage, demented style that has dominated this album up until now, lurching between domineering, juggernaut hooks and stringent, searing motifs with ease, ebbing and flowing, in the same way that Modern Serf did, between the measured and the sharper sections, and creating a dramatic, engrossing sound as a result. Challenger’s Lecture is a continuation of this rabid and energetic approach, coupling massive drums and bubbling bass with some extremely caustic and imaginative leads and vocal performances, pushing the band’s experimental elements much more prominently, and providing a tight and lean but nonetheless noxious take on the style present on the preceding track.
Without Organs, another sprawling monolith similar to The Refrain, reverts to the ponderous, layered sound of the album’s opener, creating a slow-burning feel that very quickly shifts towards a much more frenzied and bestial pace and urgency, but still makes plenty of room for virtuosic, polished riffs and more atmosphere-drenched interludes. It punctuates the visceral components with a lighter, smoother sound than has appeared on the rest of the album, a literal and distinctive change of pace that sees the song gradually begin to wind down from its epic crescendo, eventually sputtering out in a much more subdued conclusion than the listener could have expected.
It’s very rare to come across an album that is genuinely unpredictable in how it approaches its songwriting, but with Intensities, PLAGUE RIDER have certainly managed to achieve this. The newer polished versions of Challenger’s Lecture, Toil and Without Organs all sound as impressive as they did on Rhizome, and the other four tracks that accompany them are, if anything, even more frenetic and visceral. The sound PLAGUE RIDER have cultivated here is quite unlike anything any other UK death metal act is doing, and indeed stands apart from the vast majority of modern death metal in its inventiveness and intensity, making them one of the most unique and indeed creative bands within the scene at the moment.
Rating: 9/10
Intensities is out now via Transcending Obscurity Records.
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