Style: Gothic metal with black influences
Primary Emotions/Themes: Gothic horror and romance
Thoughts: I've got a spotty history with these guys. I listened to some of the earlier albums - specifically Carpathia and Deathship - I had a very difficult time getting into them. I don't mind gothic metal, but for whatever reason these guys just never clicked with me... so I let it go and never thought about them again. That is until I randomly heard the title track off of this album. Things were about to change.
That song - Into the Unknown - was one of the best written atmospheric metal songs I've heard in a damn long time. Even now eight years after it's been out it still moves me with how fucking heavy it is and how well it all comes together.
It's structured like a march, so it has this natural bouncy cadence to it. The way that the band uses this over the course of six minutes is crazy good. They ebb and flow how much is going on in the song at any moment. The verses are more mellow and stripped down consisting mostly of delayed guitar notes and a back beat with the high hat acting as the marching director. When the chorus comes in though the song swells.
This crescendo is nothing short of brilliant. Both vocalists raise their singing up a fifth and the drums go into double time (still not fast, but much more urgent than the verse). This is combined with layer upon layer of distorted guitar and keyboards, church bells, and melodies hidden deep below all the layers. It's fucking brilliant and it's become one of my favorite metal songs in the past ten years because of how damn cool it is. Easily the best song they have ever written.
Needless to say, that song was more than enough for me to check out the rest of the album. While the rest of the album was not as good as the title track I was very pleasantly surprised to see some black metal influence on some of the songs. Harsh vocals are used throughout the album and there are even some blast beats mixed in on occasion. All good things in my estimation.
Outside of excellent song writing the band also excels at pacing. They know when to get loud, they know when to be soft. They know when to be melodic, they know when to be chromatic. They know when to use harsh vocals, they know when to use clean vocals... hell they know when to use one vocalist vs. two. It's like everything on The Unknown was been planned meticulously and executed to perfection.
After I heard this album I went back and revisited those albums. Maybe I missed something in them that I would appreciate now. Nope, still don't like them. Then I go back and revisit The Unknown, yep - album still kicks all sorts of ass. Not sure why things turned out the way they did, but I'm not gonna complain. One outstanding record is better than none, and I'm privileged to have this one in my collection.
Written February 1st 2024
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