The Judge RAVES!

Date: 01/03/14

Triple Play - Part II: Hecate Enthroned - "Virulent Rapture" (Crank CRK-003) (2013)

The second instalment of our weekend CD review, chums, and you could scarcely get a bigger contrast to yesterday's offering:

I'm not, as a matter of yer actual fact, a fan of black/death metal really.

So, what in the name of Satan's singed scrotum is this doing here then?

Well, it has something to do with the fact that Hecate Enthroned is a local (-ish) band, but more to do with the fact that I've worked with the band's bass supremo Dylan Hughes for years. In fact, we started in the Depratment on the same day in 1991. And he's bigger and tougher than I am.

I started buying their CDs out of a strange sense of loyalty, then. That said, I have been able to listen to them as much as I have listened to anything else I've got in the red-shifted disc collection which surrounds me here at JudgeCo™ World Headquarters. In fact, I listened to them all in sequence just before I played their newie for the first time, just so that I could get a handle on where this release ranks in their recorded output.

A refresher course was needed, because Virulent Rapture is Hecate Enthroned's first release in almost a decade. Internal dissention, ill-health and splitting from their previous, rather exploitative, record label and the search for a new one all conspired to keep the band out of the studio groove for that long.

Not that they (whoever 'they' might have happened to be at any given moment) were idle; they gigged regularly through much of Europe during their enforced hiatus. They continued to write new material too, ready for the time when they were free to record again.

Virulent Rapture is the product of that long and troublesome process, with a new drummer in Gareth Hardy and a new vocalist (Elliot Beaver) joining Dylan, guitarists Nigel Dennen and Andy Milnes and keyboard maestro Pete White in the wonderfully-named Velocity Raptor studios in Birkenhead.

Now as I said, the whole black/death metal scene I know from nothing, so you'll get no useful comparisons with the band's contemporaries and competitors here. Be told!

So what do you get on your 5" piece of plastic here?

Previous albums tended to start with a short instrumental, long on both synth orchestration and bells. No such pussy-footing here though, as a fade-in heartbeat and a hard, ambient soundscape reminiscent of late-80s Hawkwind delivers us unto Thrones Of Shadow. The vocal range of Elliot Beaver immediately becomes apparent, with the deep, hoarse growls being interspersed with the top-range screaming reminiscent of a man who has realised that his scrotum has caught fire and he's in the middle of a drought zone. All the characteristics of Hecate Enthroned are immediately established; the furious double-stomp drums, the razor-edged guitars, the pounding bass, the gothic symphonics of synth and the lyrics full of boast and bluster about the coming of a new age of The Dark Ones™. It concludes with the harshly whispered word, "Meet"...

...And then we're straight into Unchained, with an immediate attack on all fronts, but including the band's strong melodic element which means that - with the appropriate arrangement - the song could be covered by anyone in the serious rock field. The slower middle section - complete with the obligatory minor chords from the synths moving towards the sort of string-like effects Bernard Hermann used to favour - feeds back into the closing part in which the singer warns that he will drink the blood of Christ and embrace his damnation. It then mellows down into an ambient play-out featuring that effect (for which there must be a name, but I can't think of it just now) which indicates the footsteps of an approaching very large monster, or alternately the closing of a series of crypt doors.

This segués into the beginning of Abyssal March (the track which gave the title to the band's Autumn 2013 tour, by the way), and hark! The bells! They're back! Not just the clanging chimes of Doom, though; the electronic equivalent of the whole bell-tree is brought into play here, before we're off into another blazing maelstrom interspersed with orchestral sequences which form a pleasing contrast (not to say relief) with the archetypical apocalyptic lyrics. The milk-bottle bells then return for a chilling fade-out.

We then go right into Plagued By Black Death - at just under eight minutes, by far the longest track on the album - which opens with a piano figure accompanied by the effects of crackly vinyl to give an almost filmic effect. This is then overlaid by short, jerky riffs as Elliot screams about how "Auguries of disease have finally come to pass over this world" and how the horrific contagion has come to "...scourge man and beast alike". The piece is performed with great attack and energy, as are nearly all the tracks, and the song, despite its length, never outstays its welcome thanks in part to the slow choral section (augmented by a military snare beat) about two-thirds of the way through, which gives us a space to draw breath before a sledgehammering finale.

At this stage on first listen, I was thinking that this was all good stuff, but there was nothing which was particularly out of the ordinary. I then reached the middle three tracks, which I believe, taken together, to be the peak of the album. Euphoria kicks straight in with Elliot alternating in rapid succession between the 'cookie monster' and 'dry roasted nuts' styles of vocals over a medium-fast wall of riffing.

It's at this point that I have to digress a moment to talk about lyrics. The words in black metal don't, I think, matter a great deal. They are there as part of the overall ambience, and the manner in which they are delivered is usually more important; the effect is all. So it isn't really the point if the sentiments expressed in them are hackneyed or clichéd; this is what the audience expects, and this is what it gets (there's an amusing essay here which explores some of the batty vocabulary which is used in the genre), and no death/black metal song would be complete without words like 'pestilential' and phrases like 'infernal sanctuaries' being thrown around like so much anti-incense.

The second point about the lyrics in this style of music is that, by and large, you can't make out what they are anyway because of the way in which they're sung. This is why printed lyrics might be a good idea if you as the performer really think that they matter for what they say. Previous HE albums have had them, but they have tended to be printed in Fraktur type (which is not easy to read at the best of times, unless your daily occupation is reading or carving tombstones) and on backgrounds which comprise various combinations of images in greyscale. Practically illegible, in effect.

On this album at least, that problem doesn't arise, as the words are in a nice medium-sized black serif font over a background of marbly beige. Which is just as well, because in Euphoria I had need to resort to them to correct an amusing misapprehension. I found it hard to believe that any song in this genre could possibly contain the word that I thought I had heard. I could swear that Mr Beaver was singing the word "Eurovision". Checking the printed lyrics, I found that this was not actually an attempt to ride on the forked tails of Finland's winning entry of a few years ago, in that what he was singing was:

"Liberation In Extremis"

Nonetheless, it's wonderful that even this brand of music can have its own Mondegreens.

Anyway, back to the track. It's an anthem of praise to self-cutting and the joys thereof, put to an arrangement which - with a change of instrumentation - you could just about imagine being done by a full orchestra, and with some very interesting chord sequences (I'm a sucker for a good progression, me). It fades out in an almost avant-garde string quartet stylee.

The title track then smashes its way into our ears, with an almost Arabic feel to the chords and Elliot Beaver not only singing in the good old growl, but providing a variation with treated spoken sections entoning Hughes' lyrics which seem to be about a demon returning to possess the mind (I'll have to ask him in work about this).

But then we hit something very different, and somewhat startling; a bass-dominated slower section featuring...female vocals? Yes, indeed, courtesy of ex-Cradle Of Filth vocalist Sarah Jezebel Deva; they enhance the exotic feel of the track and provide a real lift to the piece, only partly dissipated by the staccato ending.

This segués into Life, a track which Hecate Enthroned had had on the boil for some years, with lyrics by former vocalist Dean Seddon. This piece has a real chugging groove to it, with a symphonic arrangement which, again, could be orchestrated to good effect if anyone cared to - it would probably sound a bit like the louder parts of Orff's Carmina Burana. Except that the lyrics are a snarling growl against Christianity ("I learned your lies and I learned the truth / I learned your creed and I learned your noose", "A life's worth more than a life's worth to / You, King of the Jews").

To Wield The Hand Of Perdition is back to the standard double-beat bass drums and Elliot Beaver once again duelling with himself in his two registers describing the lead-up to The Final Battle Between Good And Evil, and leaving the listener in no doubt whose uniform he's wearing.

The beginning of Of Witchery And The Blood Moon initially offers us a brief respite from The Eternal Conflict (and tinnitus), opening as it does with a very attractive acoustic guitar figure which is then joined by the sort of electric guitar texture which reminded me immediately of 70s Steve Hackett. It doesn't last, of course, and after thirty seconds we're into a different part of the haunted forest with a slow-paced section with a more heavy-metal feel. The vocals start off being spoken (or perhaps 'chanted' would be a better description) before Elliot duets with himself again. Just over halfway through, there's a change of cadence which averts any danger of sameyness creeping in to the proceedings. This song, might I add, marks the first and only time to my knowledge that I've encountered the use of the word 'Antinomian' in a rock song.

The penultimate track, Immateria takes the listener somewhat by surprise. I was waiting for it to start, just like the track before it, but that's not what it's about. This is just an acoustic guitar strum accompanied by woodwind-like synth lines and, at one point, a very muted bass drum. It's an attractive, almost pastoral, piece, which sets us up nicely for the closing track.

Paths Of Silence begins once more with the acoustic guitars to the fore, but soon pounces onto another symphonic piece with another contrast between recited and sung words, of a lyric in which the protagonist stands on the precipice of nothingness - and clearly decides to jump off it ("I am become timeless amongst you, as I embrace the silence"). The pacing and arrangement of the track provides a good contrast of the rhythmic and the orchestral, and the track winds down into an instrumental coda with one final, diminishing chord.

I'm painfully aware that - looking back on all I've just written - I may not have 'sold' this album to the reader very well. As I warned at the start, I have little in the way of points of comparison to reach for other than Hecate Enthroned's earlier work. I've also let my warped sense of humour intrude rather too much, but then that's me, isn't it? Let me just say then, that this is a very good album indeed, and far and away their best one. Everything works; the material is strong (with enough changes of pace and style to prevent anything outstaying its welcome), the playing is extremely together, the arrangements are near-perfect and never at any point over-egged, and the production (this is the first HE album to be recorded digitally, which made for some serious adjustments in the way they did things) is clear and sharp, without the taint of muddiness which has characterised previous efforts. In short, they've never sounded better.

If you're remotely interested in this type of music, then this is a 'must have'. If you're merely curious about it, then this is the album you should check out.

Virulent Rapture can be ordered from Crank Records' website, and Hecate Enthroned's own site can be reached by clicking on the picture at the top of the page.

File under: Music