{"id":3376,"date":"2014-05-31T23:47:56","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T03:47:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=3376"},"modified":"2014-06-01T00:30:28","modified_gmt":"2014-06-01T04:30:28","slug":"war-eternal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/31\/war-eternal\/","title":{"rendered":"War Eternal."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Arch Enemy&#8217;s upcoming release <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B00JV5IC78\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=390957&#038;creativeASIN=B00JV5IC78&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=meadowpartyco-20&#038;linkId=P7A5E6G37MYYEU7E\">War Eternal<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=meadowpartyco-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=B00JV5IC78\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/><\/i> (due out June 10th) is the Swedish melodic death metal band&#8217;s first with new lead growler \u2026 I mean, singer Alissa White-Gluz, their tenth album over a now 19-year-career. Arch Enemy has always been among the most accessible acts in the melodeth subgenre, producing fast and heavy but, other than their debut album, not brutal tracks with clear melodic elements, technically sound guitar work, and solid vocals that didn&#8217;t distract from the underlying material. <i>War Eternal<\/i> has several tracks with the same musical strengths, but White-Gluz&#8217;s vocals and lyrics are a big step back from the band&#8217;s previous work, and sometimes it seems as if the vocalist change may have spurred a change in musical direction toward less adventurous material.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/embed.spotify.com\/?uri=spotify:album:5E6UIBrjkiPeoLHGaT64eS\" width=\"300\" height=\"380\" frameborder=\"0\" allowtransparency=\"true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><i>War Eternal<\/i> opens somewhat promisingly, with a brief instrumental (in F minor, as the title tells us) before we get to two of its strongest tracks, the muscular \u201cNever Forgive, Never Forget\u201d and the raging title track. \u201cNever Forgive\u201d is driven by a simple six-note guitar riff repeated throughout the song that breaks apart the high-tempo verses and the staccato-plucked interludes, and the shredding in its two-part solo is probably the album&#8217;s strongest for pure technical skill. \u201cWar Eternal\u201d opens with a marching pattern at machine-gun speed before downshifting into a pattern that seems drawn from classic &#8217;80s thrash acts like Testament or Exodus, adding sophisticated melodic twists before each chorus to distinguish the song. It&#8217;s a shame that it&#8217;s brought down by its simple-minded lyrics (\u201cFriend or foe\/There&#8217;s no way to know\u201d \u2026 this is the best they could come up with to open the song?), something that plagues much of the disc.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lull mid-album, including the cloddish \u201cAs the Pages Burn,\u201d where <i>War Eternal<\/i> loses some steam, but a second instrumental, the glam metal-inspired  \u201cGraveyard of Dreams,\u201d serves as a bit of a reset button before the furious strumming that opens \u201cStolen Life,\u201d the track that should most satisfy fans of Arch Enemy&#8217;s previous work. The album needed a song like this: a taut, straightforward three-minutes of speed metal, with riffs to make Dave Mustaine proud (if he could stop patting himself on the back for a few moments). That combination of songs gives the listener a chance to breathe before the last standout on the album, the five-minute opus \u201cTime is Black,\u201d a theatrical and sometimes bombastic song with several tempo shifts and classical elements better integrated here than on \u201cAvalanche,\u201d which has \u201ctrying too hard\u201d written all over it. It might have been better to follow \u201cTime is Black\u201d with \u201cDown to Nothing,\u201d which opens with a heavy grindcore pattern that reminded me of vintage Carcass \u2013 unsurprising, as Arch Enemy was founded by former Carcass guitarist Michael Amott, who worked on their landmark album, <i>Heartwork<\/i>, the album that did the most to establish melodic death metal as a viable style.<\/p>\n<p>The main drawback in White-Gluz&#8217;s vocals is her style of growling, where she&#8217;s reaching so far down to get that gutteral sound that she sounds like she&#8217;s retching, and she rarely varies this style so the listener never gets a break. Extreme metal already has a sort of built-in bias against female vocalists because of the genre&#8217;s preference for these Cookie Monster vocals, rather than the kind of operatic singing associated with British metal of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the sing-talking of 1980s speed metal, or the death-screeches of Chuck Schuldiner (of Death) or Jeff Walker (of Carcass). White-Gluz&#8217;s predecessor, Angela Glossow, found an adequate medium with a higher-pitched growl than male death-metal vocalists employ, but White-Gluz is aiming for a lower register and it doesn&#8217;t work for me. She also is far too prone to employ the most cliched move in extreme metal, roaring at maximum volume over the opening riffs. (Note to aspiring death-metal vocalists: Don&#8217;t do this.)<\/p>\n<p><i>War Eternal<\/i> also suffers from a lack of ambition, outside of \u201cTime is Black\u201d and perhaps \u201cAvalanche,\u201d sticking mostly to straightforward thrash with death-metal vocals and blast beats, when they&#8217;re at a point in their career where you&#8217;d expect more experimentation. I prefer metal with progressive or technical elements, such as on Insomnium&#8217;s <i><a href=https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/20\/insomniums-shadows-of-a-dying-sun\/>Shadows of a Dying Sun<\/a><\/i>, but if you&#8217;re interested in Arch Enemy I&#8217;d suggest starting with 2003&#8217;s <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B009SLIF22\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=390957&#038;creativeASIN=B009SLIF22&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=meadowpartyco-20&#038;linkId=5LNCQRXIM5ZCEMOF\">Anthems of Rebellion<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=meadowpartyco-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=B009SLIF22\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/><\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arch Enemy&#8217;s upcoming release War Eternal (due out June 10th) is the Swedish melodic death metal band&#8217;s first with new lead growler \u2026 I mean, singer Alissa White-Gluz, their tenth album over a now 19-year-career. Arch Enemy has always been among the most accessible acts in the melodeth subgenre, producing fast and heavy but, other [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[779,780,757,852],"class_list":["post-3376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2014-in-music","tag-death-metal","tag-metal","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3379,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3376\/revisions\/3379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}