Friday, November 18, 2016

LP Review: "The Brimstone Aggrandizement" by Echelon

The Brimstone Aggrandizement
Here's a quick preface.

Due to the recent events in America, I have grown angrier. Please expect to see lots of extreme metal.

There was a time, in the not too distant past, when Death Metal wasn't a thing.

Hell, back then we didn't even differentiate between different kinds of metal. Metallica was in the same group as Iron Maiden who was in the same group as Black Sabbath and sometimes Jefferson Airplane.

Yes, I'm old.

How so much has changed since those carefree days of youth, back when C# was as heavy and as low as we could go. Later on, Steve Vai would give the tools to Korn who made it easier to take metal into strange new places.

I would not have taken them for a T-Shirt.
The strange new places metal when in the late 90's aside....

There's some strong comfort in the music we all grew up with.

Even though it's been surpassed in so many ways, by so many albums, Morbid Angel's Covenant still holds a very special place in my black heart.

If it was compared to, even old school death metal of today, it's not going to hold up, but that sound.

Echelon has tapped into that ideal, that sound, and even added a few pleasant surprises.

If Pink Floyd were to make a death metal album, well this wouldn't be it, but there are some nice Floydian touches here and there.

In a rare happening, the drums are the star of the show. Not just the bland blast beats of certain Morbid Angel drummers from the 90's...there's riffing there. Interplay with the guitar is also found all over the tracks.

The music itself brims with anger and the guitars bubble over with melodic solos. This record brings the mid-tempo thunder and it hearkens back to a day when extreme metal was more than just extremely heavy.

Release: 12/22/16
Genre: Death Metal
Label: Transcending Obscurity
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