All Shall Align

Archspire debuted in 2010 with an EP of the same name as their debut album, "All Shall Align."  This album is extremely mediocre.  There are three things I like about it: "Deathless Ringing," the title track, and the length.

"Deathless Ringing" is basically what every Archspire song: fast riffage, sweeps, tapping, incredible musicianship, unmatched precision, etc.  It's no wonder the put this track first.  The title track is the last one on the album and it reminds me of "Xenoverse Discharger" by Wormed because of its atmospheric feel.  It's just a good outro.

So that brings us to the length of the album.  The reason I like the length of "All Shall Align" is because it's short.  At just 32 minutes, this below-average little album just sort of flies by without a lasting memory (other than "Deathless Ringing").  Yes, you read that correctly, this album is not very good.  That's why I like only three things instead of (wait, how many tracks are there?) eight.

Okay so this album may be very lacking in quality, but it has potential.  Like when you listen to some of the riffs on here, there are some good moments especially in the second track, "Archspire," but none of which are very great.  I mean, there are good moments in this track.  The song as a whole is just a bunch of different ideas thrown together with some Origin-moments and Beyond Creation bass in the background.  Actually this is basically every song.

It's painful because this album has so much potential.  It's just not organized in any orderly fashion, so it falls short of good and descends into mediocrity.  Like there are times on this album when I am genuinely excited to hear what's coming next, but it's ultimately killed due to lack of quality and too many stops in the music.  I want to enjoy this album, but I just can't when it can't even be coherent.  Also, I feel like with Archspire's past two albums, it's evident that they require good production.  Archspire's sound relies on it and they didn't have that for this album.

There's this really cool part in "Ancient of Ancients" that Archspire manages to maintain throughout a good portion of the song.  This is especially rare for them at this stage in their career, as mentioned previously, so it's good to point out.

So everything's very messy until we reach the end on "Rapid Elemental Dissolve" and the final instrumental track, "All Shall Align."  From here on out, it's pretty clear Archspire's getting their shit together by knowing when to end this album.  The final track is good, like I said at the beginning of this review.  It's very soothing and I like everything about it.  I like the melody of the clean guitar leads at the beginning, I like the backing samples and orchestration, and I like the bass guitar's chunkiness.

This is just a VERY primitive Archspire.  It sounds like they just discovered what sweep picking was and what pinch harmonics are.  "Ghosts of Silent Tongue" is especially  notorious for the pinch harmonics.  My god, I never want to hear a pinch again for the next week after hearing that song.  I mean Necrophagist goes hard with the pinches, but this is Putridity-level shit (my God, don't get me started on Putridity's newest album).  So this album is pretty average, but at leas they get it together in their next two.

Overall Rating: 63%

Originally written for themetalvoid.wordpress.com

I've heard some high praise for this band, so I investigated. Defined as "extreme technical death metal", it's pretty extreme, but the technical part I'm not seeing. This band exploits the same noodling that Beneath the Masscre and Origin use. It sounds like they're always using the same little sweeps to do their noodling. Gets really old, really fast.

That said, there are some very cool turn arounds, and sporadic switches in the songs that are pretty nice, and the album contains mostly good riffs. Solid drumming, some pivot roll blast beats, over abundance of sweeps, and occasionally ridiculously fast vocals.

It definitely borrows from Beneath the Massacre, and Origin, I see those as the two biggest influences.

If this was to be defined as "technical" I would have to ask, where are the odd time signatures? Where are the harmonies? The music is not cohesive enough to match bands like Obscura, or Necrophagist. To switch tempo randomly isn't really a good thing - I don't think I should have to point that out. It can be done to transition into a new part or to mark something in the song - just doing it to do it, is bad song writing.

Although it is very "brutal" and relentless, which is to it's merit - it's not cohesively technical, and too much using the same damn sweeps/runs with little effect (diminished, mostly in thirds - I promise, I can tell you exactly what it is - and it's in literally every song).

Conclusion: there are good riffs here and some good ideas, but there's a real lack of creativity, and really, really needs to lay off using the same sweep patterns.