ALBUM REVIEW: Outside The Spiral – Till The Dirt
Imagine writing an album so spectacular that it coaxed a legendary producer out of retirement in order to record it. Scott Burns is one of those pioneering record producers, having sat in the chair during the recording of dozens of certified death metal and grindcore classics, shaping the sound of American death metal in the process. ATHEIST‘s Kelly Schaefer, a man with a long history with Burns, who produced two of the band’s most celebrated albums – 1990’s Piece of Time and 1991’s Unquestionable Presence – sent the producer rough demos of the ideas he was working on for a new band, TILL THE DIRT, which turned out to be so impressive that Burns offered up his services for its recording, making the band’s debut album Outside The Spiral the first death metal record that Burns has produced in nearly 20 years. And even a cursory listen to this album is more than enough to illustrate just how fantastic this band and their music is.
Starring Role starts things off in energetic fashion, with chunky, dancing guitars, authoritative drums and searing vocals all creating a powerful sound right off the bat. Sonorous clean vocals and punchy, groove-laden hooks lend this a sludge feel, with the confident swagger of the leads further adding to the effect, creating an impressive death/sludge hybrid that works extremely well, immediately grabbing the listener’s attention. Outside The Spiral is tight and frenzied death metal with an ethereal atmosphere, with the jarring rhythms and arid shrieks being punctuated by bubbling bass and a palpable ambience that cuts through the visceral elements, adding a lighter edge to this rabid but incredibly focused offering.
Privilege takes the discordance and acidic vocals of the preceding track and adds disjointed riffs and pummelling percussion into the mix, continuing the dark and demented feel and providing a grating take on its formula. As It Seems, with its soulful vocals and hypnotic sound, couples the aggression of the last two songs with a blistering musicality and subtle experimental flourishes, striking a balance between the album’s harder and accessible sides perfectly. Invitation adopts a more measured pace, with rumbling bass and thunderous drums creating a dense backbone around which the grating guitars and stringent vocals form a sharper, harsher sound. Of all the songs so far, this is perhaps the closest to “traditional” death metal, with its impactful, rhythmic approach lending it a huge, juggernaut quality common to classic death metal, but with enough sudden time changes and melodic guitars that make it distinct from that tried and tested sound.
Forest Of Because adopts a thicker guitar tone and is another brilliant mix of sludge, death metal and hard rock with impassioned, mostly clean vocals crafting a monolithic, weighty sound that brings together a variety of styles, resulting in a fantastic, catchy tune that has a lot going on within it. Who Awaits peppers in a lot more extremity, although the hazy, engrossing desert rock of the opening motif never truly departs, with brief bursts of brutality interwoven around the warm, punchy style that is prevalent throughout. Insist And Demand is the sort of intricate and technically proficient progressive death metal that Schaefer is best known for, albeit with haunting vocals and meaty, bombastic hooks that are more comparable to grunge, again blending together contrasting styles, ebbing and flowing between the two seamlessly.
The Good, The Bad, The Other – a fairly straight forward death metal number – develops a huge rhythmic undercurrent around which biting passages and brooding vocals are built, adding a fresher aspect to this style, with juddering, droning hooks providing another feature that again makes this feel distinct from standard death metal. Watch You Grow Old, with its fast, aggressive sound, slick riffs, heavy grooves and wide-ranging vocals, is another excellent take on the combination of death metal and grunge. The more grating side of its sound, which comes in its second half, twins acerbic guitar playing with bestial vocals, with the two creating a jarring, vicious sound that carves through the mix like a rusty blade. Bring On The Gods steers directly into a solid death metal sound, with only the eclectic vocals and subtle, progressive leads stopping this from being a short, sharp shock of pure death metal, bringing this album to a climax on a ferocious, if slightly muted, note.
If a debut album’s intention is to set the tone for the band’s future music and lay some solid foundations, then TILL THE DIRT have created something that appears almost fully formed, and more importantly, distinct from the vast majority of bands within extreme metal. Utilising death metal not so much as the album’s core sound, but more as the base upon which the rest of the elements are arranged, this is a fantastic and diverse album that brings in a variety of musical ingredients, most notably grunge, sludge, hints of black metal and even darkwave, with the end result being quite unlike any other death metal record that has come out in over a decade, giving TILL THE DIRT a sound that is unique and invigorating when compared with many other up and coming extreme metal acts. Even if ATHEIST don’t release a new record at any point soon, it’s good to see that Kelly Schaefer has a band that is every bit as good as the one he has spearheaded for so long, and hopefully they will carve out a legacy as stunning as that of his main band.
Rating: 9/10
Outside The Spiral is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
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