A Dream of Death

There are such brilliant moments on this recording; it's a shame that the delivery is so poor. Maybe it’s the electronic drone of the drum machine, or the pitiful wail of Brian Voth’s whiny singing, or even the dirty, sludgy guitar tone (which I feel is out of place in this kind of metal), I don’t know. I just don’t see what others see this stuff. He needs a band—some real percussive power would vastly improve the feel of his music, and it might provide him with somebody to kick him in the balls when he starts moaning and crying for a 9-minute ballad. Yes, this music is supposed to be more “brainy”. Emotion does have its place in metal. But I’d seriously like to count how many times Voth uses the words “pain” and “dream” on this album. It gets very old very quickly.

As for the good, the influences on this album are nothing but the best—Voth expands nicely on the sounds laid down by Iron Maiden, 70s Judas Priest, even Mercyful Fate, with some thrashier moments thrown in for good measure. There are some totally badass riffs to be found (see “The New God”) and some great prog-type guitar work here and there, but there seems to be a gross overuse of clean chord progressions. For example: “Earthbound Goddess” has a great one, but it gets irritating, and the same sort of thing seems to be repeated through every song (this excludes the reprise in “One Last Kiss,” which is actually pretty cool). Speaking of “Earthbound Goddess”, it’s a fairly decent example of where this album so sorely lacks: It contains great riffs and structures, but the hopelessly tender lyrics, awful production, and bothersome vocalizations make it nearly impossible to take seriously. This music wants to be so much more artful than it succeeds in being. I found the second half of the album flat-out boring. I felt like I was listening to the first half simply rearranged, and in fact I had to resist the urge to quit listening and not write the review.

I actually feel bad criticizing this album so much. It has so much potential; I really want it to be good. But there are simply too many things working against it—the electronic drums, the whining vocals (Voth is the worst actor…ever), the ridiculously overblown lyrics which want to be much deeper than they really are (concept album plot be damned), the handful of good ideas which are recycled endlessly, and an overall feeling that makes this music sound downright silly. Maybe I’m not Metal. But I can’t approve.

It's a shame when all of the good words have been used, because they lose their power. Similarly, compliments like "words fail when trying to convey how good this is..." or "I know I've said it before, but THIS time I mean it..." just lose their impact. And it's a shame, because Fireaxe is one band that deserves the highest praise, in my opinion, so in an effort to really convey why I think this band is so great let me just say this: music becomes art when it aspires to and achieves the artistic ideal of communicating feelings and emotions from the artist to the listener, and on that score Brian Voth (the sole member of Fireaxe) is a true artist because his music has touched me deeply like no music has in a LONG fucking time.

Enough heady talk; down to specifics: Fireaxe, as I said before, is the one-man project of guitarist/bassist/vocalist/songwriter/drum programmer Brian Voth. The overall style is heavy metal in the most 'traditional' sense, in that it harks back to the glory days of Judas Priest and the like, but it is much more epic in scope and quite progressive in song writing and execution. The songs are quite long and involved, going through several mood/feel changes. The writing is very intricate - the way riffs develop into one another and help the songs flow naturally from section to section (or, more properly, mood to mood), the layering of guitar parts, vocal parts, the especially good lead guitar work... everything is thought out and calculated for the ultimate end of serving the song. It's hard to believe this is all the work of just one person, because it sounds so HUGE - but not in the traditional sense. Because this is the work of just one person (recording at home on an 8-track with a drum machine, running direct... details are in the CD and on the website), the production may seem lo- fi to some, which appears at odds with the clean, polished sound the songs seem to be written for, but that doesn't matter. The music sounds huge because of the great attention to detail Brian has put into this stuff.

And I STILL haven't talked directly about the album "A Dream of Death". Bear with me....

"A Dream of Death" is Brian's third release, the first on CD. It's a 10 song, 73 minute concept album about a futuristic society and a rebel within it. Of course, it can also be seen as a metaphor for this shitty world we live in. The songs develop the tale of the protagonist through his growth, struggle, and eventual death at the hands of the mechanistic society of his world. The young are trained and broken on "The Rack", the only relief from which are dreams (which are unknowingly crafted for the people by the evil....well, you'll see...). He goes from dream to dream, believing in dream after dream, only to have each one shatter, shown to be the illusion it is - love, financial security, religion... Eventually, he comes to a state of "Unholy Rapture", when he realizes that, in destroying dreams, he destroys hope, but he also destroys the possibility of being hurt by that dream's non-fulfillment. Eventually, he declares himself "The Destroyer of Dreams" and goes around destroying the dreams of others, freeing them from the mental enslavement of the dream-maker (who? I'll get to that...). Eventually, he is captured by the minions of the dream maker and taken to face it. The Dream-Maker is an intelligent computer which was created by humanity to make life easier for people; however, as it made life easier, society stagnated, so the computer realized that it had to CREATE strife to make people unhappy, so that they would rebel, destroy the old dream, build a new one, and thus be more productive (and, ironically, more enslaved) - and so the computer created the protagonist to act as "A Wrench in the Works", to destroy the dreams of the current society to make future life better for all. So what happens to the Protagonist? You'll have to listen and see....

Throughout the whole album the music is carefully crafted to help mirror the moods of the protagonist - the frustration of being broken and the alternating periods of torture and release while waiting for more are captured in the ten-minute plus opener "The Rack"; the clean-chord strumming and mournful melodies of "Earthbound Goddess" show his yearning for love lost; "The New God" contrasts the vigor of pursuing a dream (via powerful, strutting rhythms) with the dismay of having wasted all that work when it turns out to be a lie (with tense, syncopated thrashing riffs); the feeling of power and fury is caught in the simply breakneck-paced, steamroller-on-speed riffing in "I am the Destroyer of Dreams"; finally, in one of the greatest musical strokes on the album, the climbing key-modulations in "Wrench in the Works" mirror the unfolding of the computer's tale of human evolution, and then its own, and then the protagonists - and then it falls flat to the beginning key when he learns the awful truth about himself.

You can tell from the way a lot of the stuff is written that Brian has put a lot of himself into the music, something that makes the music sound 'human' and 'personal', which helps keep away the pretentiousness and pomposity that most progressive metal is guilty of. Quality, tastefulness, honesty; all of these can be applied to the music of Fireaxe. It's not extreme in any sense of the word, and I dare say that a lot of you would listen to this and dismiss it, but you would be doing a great disservice. Fortunately, you need not spend a dime to check it out - in one of the boldest moves of any band I've encountered (and the one thing that, more than anything else, proves Brian's dedication to the ART of his music), Fireaxe has made the entire album available in CD- quality MP3 on the band's website, and express license is given to distribute in any way you see fit so long as you don't take credit or sell for profit. I urge EVERYONE to give it a listen. Music doesn't get much better than this.

(Originally published at LARM (c) 2000)