Album Review: Enthroned - Ashspawn
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Winter comes, with it, the frosts. Crystals in webs sneaking over the windowpanes, dead trees as stunted black capillaries nailing withered branches to frigid mists. In these bleaker fractions of the calendar, we all find ourselves in need of a little hellfire to warm our shivering bones. And Enthroned seemingly agree wholeheartedly, because here we stand on the cusp of a new opus – “Ashspawn”.
There’s a satisfying sweet spot that a lot of albums from veteran bands seem to alight in that you could sum up with the phrase “Good, but not great”. Consistently satisfying releases that scratch whatever the itch might happen to be, but that don’t shift the genre forward or otherwise blow your mind out your cranium. That’s where I am with Enthroned’s newest. If I’m not slack-jawed at it’s genius, I’m certainly enjoying it’s incandescent take on black metal regardless. In terms of rating the searing chops of the fiery canticles here bestowed, I’d say they’ll leave you well-browned. If you were a steak, you’d be a good medium-rare, done on the outside but the knife will still draw blood if pushed deep. And that’s thanks to tracks like “Basilisk Triumphant” - an irascible typhoon before which there is little to be done but cling desperately to churning wreckage and pray for survival. Its combination of absurdly ferocious blasting and slower, unwelcoming sections mixed with an echoing cascade of a vocal performance feels something like being lobbed through one eye of a storm to another through a sickle-edged nightmare of hail and scourged tides. You sink below clamouring waves just as the song closes with a splayed tangle of discord. At its strongest points then, Enthroned display a pristine aptitude for black metal, unchaining heretical concatenations of riffs, screams and percussion that exemplify it in black iron clad.
Yet parts of the album – especially towards the latter half – do feel as though they overstay their welcome a bit. Between moderate tempo and repetition comes the distracting nibble of mild tedium; title track “Ashspawn” has gallons of lava-splattered highlights, but also rides the stumbling chug of its verse for around twice as long as it feels like it should do. It’s not as though these are short songs, and for some of them a bit of crash dieting might not have been the worst choice. It’s potentially something that bugs me more due to my own personal preferences for music that goes like a meth fiend whippet, but something like “Raviasamin” – while it might be a bit “stock standard fast black metal” for some – ticks off all the blasty boxes for me. The guitar revs up for a second in the beginning before a chainsaw of blastbeats and powerchords grinds through the crust of your skull. It slows down with the predatory sway of a cottonmouth gauging the distance to its prey at 1:58 before the fangs spear your carotid at 2:34. It’s in these rampaging minutes that the band feels closest to peerless, when the slowdowns carry the mortifying tension of a cocked hammer, the “clack-clack” of the shotgun slide that indicates the imminent closure of the “fuck around” stage and subsequent commencement of the “find out” stage as the blastbeats slam buckshot through your chest cavity.
Against that though, a song like “Ashen Advocacy” just seems to limp by, shaking its fist in a curmudgeonly but unthreatening display of elderly disapproval. It’s almost eight minutes long and the first half is more or less the same riff recycling over a drumbeat like the puerile trudge of a sulking toddler. It does burst forth from it’s stultifying chrysalis into life at 3.38, but the damage is rather done at that point by a front end that’s simply far longer than it needs to be. Matters aren’t assisted any by the song deciding it would rather return to the sleeping bag immediately afterwards, serenaded by these curious hoots at 5.25 that sound a bit like they just recorded a guy jumping in a cold shower. It shakes a leg a bit more towards the end, though hardly enough to warrant keeping the song on the full release without a significant fat reduction. “Assertion” too feels a touch too comfy sauntering along as well, though it fares infinitely better than “Ashen Advocacy” does. I don’t know, it could just be me, but these latter two songs conclude an otherwise mighty return for the band (their first album in six years) in unfortunately muted fashion, which damages the complete impression much more than it might if it had all the same songs, but shuffled them around so that two of the weaker offerings on the tracklist didn’t sit back to back right at the end.
I’d prefer not to end the album on as dour a note as the album itself ends on. A sterner grip on the editing process for those last two tracks would be welcome, but ultimately if you like black metal – and you should – then you will like this. It reminds me – somewhat painfully actually – that I probably should have taken the hint and explored the band much more thoroughly than I ever did when I first heard “Through the Cortex” from their 2007 album “Tetra Karcist”. I loved that song – why I never probed further shall forever stand as a solemn testament to my youthful foolishness, but I hope that this review has gone a measure of the way to amending the missteps of a younger reviewer. So if the frost nips, and the antifreeze has run dry, fear not – all the flames you could ever need are here to heed Enthroned’s summons.
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