Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Ara - Devourer of Worlds




Ara delivers an avalanche of dissonant riffs and deathcore grooves with all the weight and grace that the natural disaster brings. If heaps of riffs shoveled into the furnace are the type of thing you like, then this is probably made for you. However, I don't consider a pile of boulders and dirt to be an artistic achievement, I'd rather see a single rock sculpted into Michaelangelo's David than a thousand unshaped rocks crashing down. After all, any chump with high explosives can cause an avalanche, an the media tells me that everyone has dangerous explosives these days. No puns intended, with regard to the album title, listening to this album just feels like sifting through a pile of rubble in hopes of finding a gemstone.

Once you find yourself trapped under this rubble, you'll feel some of that dissonant, chaotic churning native to caverncore, but without the reverb that a genuine cavern offers. Riffs of all shapes and sizes are piled together with dust between them - spastic, angular tech riffs, breakdown-like deathcore grooves, and angular death metal riffs which lose their velocity when crashing into the disorganized pile. There's a decent variation in rhythms too, natural when a hundred parts come crashing together and get smashed into random sizes. Big riffs, small riffs, fast beats, slow beats. They could be used to build castles, but they're just a pile of rubble on this album.



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