voila_la_scorie
A friend of mine is fond of a music application with which you select an artist and a song by that artist gets played, and then after that other songs by musically related artists will play. By example, he entered Amon Amarth and then began skipping through song after song, just to show me which bands the application was pulling up. One band that caught my attention was Kataklysm. A week later, I recalled seeing something in a Japanese metal magazine about extreme metal bands from Montreal and I decided to do a search for such bands. Of course, Kataklysm was one of the top bands to crop up in the search, and I recognized the name from my friend’s app. Two weeks later and without preview (or pre-listen), “Waiting for the End to Come” was in my hands.
The album arrived along with several others as part of my delving into the death metal sub-genre, which I had previously experienced only through Opeth and Gorguts. As I listened to all my new acquisitions and then repeated the exercise, I found “Waiting for the End to Come” was catching my ears. “Like Animals” and “The Promise” had some excellent heavy riffs, “Under Lawless Skies” and “The Darkest Days of Slumber” sounded surprisingly melodic in spite of the roaring, guttural vocals, and several other songs had aspects that drew my attention. Within a week I ordered a second Kataklysm album!
Two other albums I brought home in the first batch were Amon Amarth’s “Twilight of the Thunder God” and Bolt Thrower’s “Those Once Loyal”. In comparison, I felt Kataklysm’s album was the most engaging. Admittedly, there is a kind of generic feeling to the songs of the album when considered together; there is little variety if any in the style of the music. Songs tend to be brutal and angry (“If I Was God… I’d Burn It All”, “Kill the Elite”, “Empire of Dirt”) and often include melodic parts. There are two vocal styles present: the aforementioned death growl and one of those throat-shredding screams. Kataklysm originally made themselves known for their “Northern hyper-blast” drumming style, but I think somewhere along the way when they went from death metal to melodic death metal, that drumming style became reserved as a technique for certain parts in certain songs. (Indeed, I hear more blast beats on my second purchase, the slightly older “Prevail”).
I actually read a few reviews of this album on another metal site and the remarks were interesting. Many people said that in recent years, Kataklysm’s albums had become repetitive. Their once fresh melodic death metal sound was not coming up with anything new. However, a least a couple of reviews stated that this album, while not bringing anything new to the table, was at least a revived and reinvented take on the band’s style, and all reviews gave this album favourable ratings. So this strikes me as a good entry album into the band. Out of curiosity, I listened a little to a couple of their older songs and the style is quite different, being closer to fellow Montrealers, Cryptopsy.
I don’t think it will be imperative to get a bunch of recent Kataklysm albums but this album has encouraged me to check out more of the band’s catalogue. A melodic death metal album worth checking out.