ALBUM REVIEW: These Graven Halls – Balmora
These Graven Halls is an ambitious and bold debut album from BALMORA, but you can’t help but feel like it treads on uncertain ground. Building a name for themselves and their 00s infused metalcore over the last few years, BALMORA’s debut album feels less like an introduction to their vision, and more a full on assault of everything they have.
Album highlights come in the various collaborations across the album. Lead single Ophelia featuring HOLDER is a cinematic and brutal track that melds metallic guitar pinch harmonics with some truly crushing breakdowns and ascending respites. Melodic black metal and deathcore riffs are aplenty across the album. The Beautiful Writing featuring I PROMISED THE WORLD boasts soaring melodic, chantable moments amidst its unrelenting riffs, and feels cut straight out of the 00s metalcore influence BALMORA have been grounding themselves in across their previous EPs.
Influences are something BALMORA have always worn on their sleeves. From the likes of THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER and ON BROKEN WINGS to mixed media spanning the Silent Hill franchise, Death Note, and even their name being an Elder Scrolls reference. The opening of The Day You Died is fast and fuelled by theatrics, as is the penultimate track Timor Mortis with its string section. These theatrics are heightened by instrumental interludes …an apology everlasting… and …an effigy to the star of all sorrow…, which add into the overall world BALMORA are building. Across the album you’ll find a skull crushing breakdown and a searing riff that will instil that kind of adrenaline that makes you feel transported into these kinds of spaces, and they exist along side spliced sounds from church bells to audio samples from the likes of 1985 film Legend.
In committing to building this world of dark fantasy infused aesthetics and theatrics, by the second half of the album, it feels as if BALMORA are throwing out every trick they have and seeing what lands. Ultimately, in throwing everything at the wall, not a whole lot has stuck. Listening as a whole, it’s difficult not to feel bogged down by the sheer amount of influences, samples and ideas that are being thrown at you. Tracks like Needles & Rags are lost in the noise, meanwhile, closing track NGV veers off completely into a BLADEE homage that feels disjunct at the album’s close. In seeking to build their own world of influences, they’ve overcrowded their own sound and the direction seems unclear, with so many ideas that it can’t quite breathe on its own.
BALMORA have been gaining traction over the last few years, and for good reason. They are making some of the more exciting music in metalcore at the moment and have a keen sense of where they want to pull from. These Graven Halls is an ambitious undertaking for the band, showing off all of the facets that add up to make BALMORA. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts. There’s an album within These Graven Halls that displays both BALMORA’s aesthetic vision and sound, but it is buried amidst a lot of ideas that could have been left on the cutting room floor.
Rating: 6/10
These Graven Halls is out now via DAZE.
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