I didn't know what I was doing when I picked this up from In A Groove records in 1998. It was a local shop that sold mostly records and a few CD's. Every once in a while a metal CD would be there and I would pick it up, one of those was God Dethroned's new album at the time.
At the time I was just starting to discover the extreme side of metal in earnest and with a band name like God Dethroned this had to be extreme. I was not disappointment with that aspect, but there was another unexpected part of the music as well that would influence my taste in music for the next year or so.
On The Grand Grimoire, God Dethroned play an aggressive style of melodic death metal. Most of the time this is full on death metal with higher pitched vocals as is seen in the opening track: The Art of Immolation. The song is high intensity and features a simple verse/chorus structure. The riffs are simple and deliver a successful uppercut to the jaw to start the album, but it's not a true representation of the sound that God Dethroned have on this album.
The title track has a different story though. The aggression of the opener is there, but there is a renewed emphasis on melody in the lengthy instrumental section. The rhythm guitar will play open chords and the lead guitar has these soaring melodies that get stuck in my head for hours upon hours.
It's not just on the title track either, it permeates a majority of the songs on the album. The Somberness of Winter has an especially powerful outro to the song. That melody in particular is so infectious that it will pop in my head randomly completely out of no where.
While many of God Dethroned's albums are solid, this one in particular stands out to me. I would go on a long quest to try to find other bands that mimicked the style found here. I searched for a year or so and never found another album that matched this aggression with the epic melodies found on this album. It's a shame, but 20+ years later this album still holds up for me because of that very reason.
No comments:
Post a Comment