Vigils of the 3rd Eye

Vigils of the 3rd Eye is the debut release of American progressive death metal act Howls of Ebb. The term "progressive" applied to death metal usually signifies an attempt to focus on technicality and showing off, eschewing that what death metal should be - filthy, primal and evil. Enter Howls of Ebb - their début has a twisted progressive edge, yet retains that evil and filth the genre should have, while filled with their own originality. A stunning release from the new comers, Vigils of the 3rd Eye is an avant-garde progressive gem, albeit a murky, filthy unrefined one.

Strange dissonant guitar playing, twisted and insane comes in from the start. Sounding closer to the progressive metal leanings of Norwegians Atrox than any of the death metal greats, it's the only possible point of reference for one of the most unique guitar performances heard in death metal. There's so much variation to the guitar here it's staggering. There's strange progressive twists and turns, sections of out right pummelling, and a use of effects and different tones which really sets them apart. There's discordant, twisting riffs at points, while the usual tremolo picked fury is also in place. But add strange, picked chord progressions and frantic solos, echoing reverb drenched twanging and mad experimentation, and there's just so much craziness for one album. Simply put, the depth to the guitar performance here is staggering, delivering a churning maelstrom of twisted, trippy madness. Add to that some of the most sick growls imaginable, low caveman-like evil grunts, and you have another layer for their crazy sound. Belted out at speed they're really intense. It's just as varied too, with the snarls on the title track sounding incomprehensibly evil - low, guttural and frothing with beast-like fervour.

The best track is Of Heel, Cyst and Lung, sounding completely tripping and disturbing, with a great main riff, amongst insane melodies. Unexpected breakdowns, stopping and starting for discordant twangs, then suddenly unleashing twisted Autopsy-esque solos, the structure of the song is brilliant. All over the place, going from pummelling fury to an oppressive standstill in seconds, the echoing picked guitar creates an incredibly oppressive atmosphere, while the main motif throughout the song sounds fantastic in all it's incarnations - fast and heavy, slow and trippy, consistently creative. The way it builds up to the chugged stomp in the middle is brilliant, and those rhythmic drum fills throughout are fantastic.

The drumming might mostly consist of d-beat assaults and blasts, but it's primal and caveman-ish, clubbing the listener senseless, while the bass just rumbles away, cavernous and dark. The rhythm of course just provides the backdrop for those wonderful guitars and vocals, though they play their part spectacularly. A murky, dark production also gives a raw rough edge to Vigils of the 3rd Eye, sounding cavernous and completely evil. There's no light to be found here, the entire thing is bathed in filth and darkness. You won't hear another album like this all year, and you haven't heard anything like it before. Vigils of the 3rd Eye is unique, trippy and brilliant. Absolute genius.

One surefire method to reduce your chances at getting lost among the sheep of the 'retro death metal' movement: re-invent the stuff, return to what first struck your fancy about the style and then scrawl your own alternate manifestation of the medium into being. Howls of Ebb is not the first, and won't be the last to take such an approach, and naturally there is no means to guarantee its 100% uniqueness, but this is one of a precious few death metal records I've heard lately where the immediate reaction wasn't to compare it to album A by artists B and C. Yeah, if you stop to think of it for awhile, your memory might drift back to other examples of comparable vocals or guitar stylings, usually on the 'fringe' of the genre, but Vigils of the 3rd Eye nonetheless is a fresh invigoration which takes a few liberties with the form while retaining the morbid, unnerving narrative of extreme metal.

First and foremost, this is just a collection of more organic sounds than you're likely comfortable with in a market saturated with thickly distorted, raw guitars or clinically polished technical wanking. Howls employs a cleaner tone throughout, whether that be on the tremolo picked patterns, dissonant chord abuse or all the jangling, sporadic insanity playing out in the background of a tune like "The Arc. The Vine. The Blight." It's almost like opening the rehearsal room doors between a methodic, meticulous death metal band and a bunch of guys fucking around in some sort of progressive post-hardcore aesthetic, and then recording how they play off one another in a contrast of chaos and control. Some inspiration has clearly drifted over here from creator Patrick's other project, Trillion Red which had a unique spin on progressive rock with metallic underpinnings; and I also might describe this as Gorguts' Obscura if it were produced by jam rockers in Nashville...which probably makes no sense to anyone but myself, but that's the strength of Vigils of the 3rd Eye...it's so uncanny and open to interpretation that few individuals will come out of it feeling the same.

Not all is heavy and harmful here, because there are a number of spacier ambient guitar interludes and sparser, disjointed riff passages that I could only liken to bizarre groups like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum or The Book of Knots; these are crucial to how the album pans out as a whole, giving the listener a brief but 'unsafe' respite between periods of madness. A great example is how that wailing guitar in the title track sets up the broken, harder guitars and eventually gallop into thundering catharsis. Vocals are a dour guttural which teeters between the traditional black and death metal techniques, but is often paced with more of a spoken word, narrative syllabic structure than just straight lines delivered over riff measures. The drums and plodding bass lines are airy and natural and contribute fully to the naturalistic feel of the recording as a whole, though they're obviously a little more vacuous in terms of inventiveness when matched against the guitars. But despite the relative 'looseness' of how Howls of Ebb conceives its materials, as sandboxes in which to play about in rather than rigid constructs, there is a glaring cohesion to the experience which seems to slap the listener around a little over the first few tracks, and then erupt into a creative climax with the last 20-ish moments: "Illucid Illuminati of the Dark" and "The Devious Nectar" which will fuck your head right off its stump...

Sound intriguing? Well it is, and Vigils of the 3rd Eye is without question one of the more curious death metal concoctions you're like to hear amongst the faceless legions of cavern core aspirants and classic Swedish cut & paste that is flooding the market to a state of overflow. The most accurate I might describe it is as a median between the fragmented nightmarescapes of Ævangelist and the springy gloom of Arizona's TOAD, but there's a lot of space in there for Howls of Ebb to splash around in, and though this isn't the most obsessively immortal, catchy thing I've heard lately, anyone who can crack his/her skull open long enough to let it properly seep in will appreciate its instinctive, eclectic, alien and atmospheric textures.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com