Grimbane
Let The Empires Fall
6
To my surprise, it seems religion really chaps the tender inner workings of some folks out there. Go figure. I guess I’ve got Canada’s Grimbane (with members of Blasphemy, Procreation, and Odin’s Law among others) to thank for it, because if I couldn’t figure out which angle they’re coming from during the beginning of Let The Empires Fall, I’d have to be a blazing moron not to get it by the time it’s over with. Not only does religion piss people off, it pisses them off enough to write music about it. Holy shit, where have I been?
Yeah, it’s kinda’ obvious like that. Cellophane thin, warble-soaked blackened riffs, barely held in place by mid-paced blast beat drums, with a frosted gremlin on vocals. I could leave it at that and be an asshole, but there’s a little more to it because Grimbane are really quite tolerable, especially when it comes to overall flow from start to finish, musically. It’s a very smoothly structured album when only music is taken into account, and the spoken word segues didn’t do too much to disrupt the momentum. It’s conceptual, fine. It’s also a little bland through too much of the disc, with only bits and pieces of generally mundane songs managing to all too briefly transcend the drone, most notably “Cauldron Of Burning Iron” when the gremlin-like spoken word manages to blend in well with the cohesive ebb and flow of the powerfully stomping arrangement. However, the pure fury of “God Cremated” thoroughly commands attention from the onset, and is easily a frenzied yet coldly harmonious standout with no real weakness at all. Blistering stuff, very Immortal Pure Holocaust in a way, and the title track follows with a similar swarm of nasty high speed tremolo.
Let The Empires Fall starts out rather unimpressively with the extended intros, and basic tunes such as “Tyrannize Christians”, “Obscurity Reigns”, and “Unscrupulous Religion” (bricks No.1, 2, and 3 for your head with 1,970 pounds to go Sir?) just sort of pummel along, but things improve tremendously when “Overlord Of Chaos And Evil” comes forth in a frenzied well-paced rhythmic spasm. “Theomicrians Descend On Angels” then unfortunately takes a step right back to the more nondescript blast material they began with. When I really think about it, Grimbane has issued a disc that really frustrates the shit out of me even more as a fan than a critic, since the good and the bad are pretty evenly balanced to my ear as far as individual tracks go, and I’d be a douchebag not to mention the purely glorious closer that is “Before The First Day” arguably the finest, most varied and textured offering on par with earlier triumph “Instinct For Iniquity”.
Now that whatever is left of the Holy Spirit has been forcefully expelled from me with the help of this CD, my only opinion of Let The Empires Fall is that it’s something I might listen to a couple times of my own choosing, and then bid it adieu after collecting dust for a few months. If you like your blackish metal fairly bullshit free, but still charged with a fairly potent amount of energy, you might wanna’ kiss your ears with a sample tune or two if you can find them before kissing some cash goodbye. Not terribly bad at all, but nothing you should be breaking your fingers typing out an order for.
