Embodiment

It's really hard to put any genre definition on Sculptured's last album, so the best you can really do is call it progressive/avant-garde and wonder why and how the fuck they wrote this music. Embodiment continues to be one of the albums I put into the CD player often these days and every time I listen to it I hear something new. There's just so much shit going on that you can't help but feel like you're caught in some kind of chinese finger trap. You can't stop listening, because you want to hear what's next in the maniacal plan.

Foremost for me in this album is the drumming. He's used this opportunity to really show off his skills and does pretty much everything in the handbook and then some. You're going to hear time signatures Tool or Dream Theater haven't dreamed of yet and some of the craziest drum fills and polyrhythms around. If for anything you should listen to this album to hear the incredible drumming.

Next up would be the vocals, which are varied between death metal growling, black metal screeching, catchy clean sections, narration, etc. If you can think of a metal vocal style, it's probably somewhere on this album. The lyrics themselves are just as impressive, though not quite as varied. The general theme of the album is very atheistic and self-loathing, almost as if they were a French suicidal black metal band trapped in a progressive outfit. If you're not keen on God-hating, life-questioning ideas, then this definitely is not the album for you.

I'll wrap this up on the rest of the instrumentation and overall construction of the songs. Like the drumming, other instruments get a shot at showing off often on this album, but more often than not things are kept fairly minimalist. The production seems to be the real aim as lots of different effects are used on the guitars (and vocals at times) and the atmosphere shifts around with the frantic movements of the songs. There are sections of relatively quiet melody interspersed with oddly timed riffing accompanied by dissonant keyboards and vocal lines. A great deal of the music comes off sounding like a jumbled mess without digging deeper and listening multiple times to hear all the little things going on. I can definitely see why some people would hate this album for seeming avant-garde for the sake of being avant-garde, but in reality there is a concept and theme going into the strangely composed surface which fits perfectly with the message of the lyrics. There's truly "nothing more useless than organs," and no matter how hard they try to convey their message with the music, it still ends up sounding like chaos. Was this intentional? Who knows, but I like to think it was.

If you're interested in hearing one of the most ridiculous pieces of progressive/avant-garde music to ever come out of America, then definitely check this out. It is a memorable listen indeed, even after a dozen spins. Can you figure this puzzle out?

As an existing fan of one of this supergroup's parent bands 'Agalloch,' I was at first, admittedly a bit cold to this completely different style. Whereas Agalloch is very folk and ambient based metal, the jump to avant-garde tech metal was quite a leap to take as a listener. Despite the praise friends had showered it and my love for Agalloch, I sadly passed this one by when it was released in 2008. Fortunately however, I was lucky enough to find it lying about in a record store and picked it up in the hopes that I had been wrong on my initial judgement of them. Luckily, I was.

Even disregarding the association with Agalloch, Sculptured can be a bit of a hard adjustment to make. Elevator-music style organs paired with technical death metal? Yes, this is an avant-garde metal band we're talking about here.

The extreme vocals here are solid and fit the dark, menacing vibe of the album. The biggest musical problem I have with the album (at least initally) were the clean vocals. While I usually really like clean vocals against heavy metal, I really did not find the vocals to fit the musical style at all... Maybe this was because the previous singer ran off due to conflicting views between his religion and the lyrics themselves but things didn't seem to work out; the singer just didn't sound 'good' in my ears. Like the organs however (which at first, I found distracting from the otherwise brilliant guitar riffage) they start to grow on me and I could now see why Thomas Walling was chosen for the job. He is actually a great singer but not in a metal style at all, which felt awkward at first but eventually just added to the album and band's character.

It's easy to see why the previous clean singer could not handle the lyrical content. The lyricist here very clearly states his beliefs here. Most of the words deal with the non- existence or impotence of god, and existentialism. Obviously the lyricist has taken some courses in philosophy, but there's a lot of quotable lines here. As long as you're not religious (or if you are, not easily taken to offense) there's some brilliant poetry here.

The highlight of the album has to be the finale, which can only be described as 'magical.' Intense polyrhythms mixed with melodic beauty is something that dreams are made of. The albums trails of much unlike the energy it came in with; with a fragile piano melody and timid narration.

For fans of avant-garde metal, it shouldn't take too long to realize that this is a future classic of the sub-genre. I personally prefer the sound of the sister band Agalloch alot more due to the fact that there's alot more emotion involved but this just proves something that was already evident; the members of Winds and Agalloch (and Estradasphere, in this case) are brilliant musicians and highly talented. A great piece of tech metal and a piece teeming with thought and layers to peel back and enjoy. Great material, to put it simply.

Let it be known that I am a huge fan of Sculptured… of their first album at least. Their debut had a few minor problems but was an excellent release all in all. Since it, Sculptured seem to have been working on the problems, in the wrong way. They’ve perfected their inadequacies, worsening, instead of irradiating them.

The virtual lack of samples in this album is rather disappointing, as they played a major part in making the self-titled a great album. There are only a few rather hurriedly-placed ones that leave much to be desired. Their inclusion seems to be almost out of habit than out of desire.

Vocally, this album is a mess. Both the clean vocals and harsh vocals are entirely unsatisfactory, the clean ones are strained, out of place and practically off-key; and the harsh ones seem almost forced, and completely lacking in the required emotion. Not even the lyrics can rescue this sinking ship, they seem to be written by a pubescent sissyboy who believes himself to understand both the English language and the concept of depression, he is wrong.

The drums sound as though they have been recorded as a completely separate project from the album itself, they are so blatantly off, so very often that one struggles to associate them with the songs they feature in. There are several parts in which the drummer seems to be lashing out at random.

The riffs in this release are abysmal; the band, seemingly, opted to try and fuse death metal riffs with progressive ones. The result of this failed experiment being watered down, boring-as-hell guitar work.

Another downer for me is the pathetic display by the keyboards. The keys, another great part of the debut, only make a cameo appearance in which they remain out of key, out of sync and, just like the drums, randomly bashed at.

This album is an absolute pain to listen to; the unexplainable drum beats, weak riffs, and terrible vocal displays will grate against your temples. It really is a shame to watch the talent that Sculptured has go to waste.

Sculptured have made quite a name for themselves, firstly, for being a side project of Agalloch guitarist Don Anderson, and secondly, for making music that is in theory very bizarre and confusing, but in practice quite catchy, easy to get caught up in melodic death metal, just written in a complex and interesting way you which doesn't take over the flow of the album. Whether it's the painfully complex to understand 12 tone system, or in this case, the sheer volume of organ like keyboard driven pieces and odd rhythms and blending of instruments, the band has made music that is as easy to follow and nod along to as the most simple and redundant melodeath band.

Embodiment is no exception, structurally complex, simple to listen to music is here in huge volumes. Sure there's a few parts that just sound plain mental, such as the curious break near the end of Taking My Body Apart. But for the main part this is smooth sailing, with all forms of rhythmic complexity hidden beneath.

This is how this band is enjoyable, the music is truly quite interesting, but you can still just listen to it for fun, which is a damn good combination if you ask me. There's years of odd stuff to find in this album, hidden behind almost every riff or keyboard part. And at its best, this album is extremly enjoyable and has a huge listening life. However, it's often not at its best. And this is for one reason...

The band isn't terribly good at doing death metal. Riffs are the least important part of the musical makeup, and the growls are poor to average at best. Somewhere half between a standard growl and a Gothenburg wail.

Sure, I love Agalloch more than my own Mother, but that doesn't stop me from saying that Don isn't really the most fantastic guitarist whoever lived. Yes, he writes some incredibly good, sorrowful solos, and is responsible for a lot of that band’s finest emotional passages. But that's due to his amazing talent in writing things for atmosphere. Not because of his amazing talent to write attention grabbing or heavy riffs that as if by psychic force make you throw your body at walls, like a good death metal guitarist would, because he doesn’t. His riffs just generally aren't that good. There are few good ones, but for the main part, the songs direction is dictated by either the drumming, or by the keyboard work. His soloing is great, but it's in the riffs where he struggles. It's always a toss up between writing a complex piece of structuring, or just writing some riffs, and the structure almost always wins, leaving him playing simple riffs in support of the keys.

Speaking of keyboards, the keyboardist is indeed talented, but his tone is awful, sounding usually like some form of organ, despite the clean piano breaks which appear in three of the five songs. This pretty much demonstrates just how in command of the sound this guy is. Seriously, how many lengthy clean piano solos do you need in an album? If you said at least three, buy this album now. Otherwise, it just gets irritating eventually. However, the drumming is actually quite good, despite being a little bit too skittish at times. When every song has at least three sections that involve slow disjointed music over drumming with 15 notes per second, it gets a little old.

This where the album has its problem, all of the little idiosyncrasies the band has are on offer during all the tracks, for a lot of the time. And because these things they do are so different to the style of music they usually play, they stand out, and after surprising you on the first couple of songs, they get a little boring, although never predictable.

Finally, there are the vocals. The harsh vocals are fairly monotone and average. Not really very aggressive, but far more enjoyable than most melodeath vocalists, despite this band not really being of the genre. But the clean vocals are disgusting. A collection fairly toneless, uncomfortable, bad singing. They make me want to “vomit so much that I would want to shut my mouth completely shut”. This leads me to lyrics. That quoted gem I just mentioned, that came from this album. It doesn't get any better. Just lots of bad lyrics about the uselessness of life from what I can understand. Not in the emo sense, but in the sense of humanity or the physical body being useless. This could be done well, but isn't.

Still, the ratio of enjoyment to disgust is clearly in favour of the happy side. There’s a lot of interesting music here, and the bands structuring is quite incredible. Not to mention that the good parts on this album, and there are quite a few never get old because of the depth in the writing. For this reason I have to say that, unlike a lot of other Agalloch side projects, this album is still worthwhile.