Weapon - From the Devil's Tomb
November 17 2010 at 10:00:23 AM  Divine furor? If anything, the follow-up to Weapon’s Drakonian Paradigm is grounded in starkly improved songwriting, riffing, and production, a finger firmly pointing towards the terrestrial and a sound surprisingly not unlike Deicide’s first two or Morbid Angel’s Blessed Are the Sick. Without a peek at Ben Vierling’s phantasmagoric cover art or song titles scraped from the blood on Satan’s claw, I’d say, “Well goddamn, this’ Death Metal, aint it?” Riffs are that accomplished. Little to none of the bullshit blasting present that made Nightbringer’s latest such an interminable yawner. There’s even an instrumental, “LEFTHANDPATHYOGA” that could’ve been cribbed from Cliff Burton (no shit). Sounds uneven, right? A novel and strange direction? A definite departure of some sort? A divergence between Black Metal tropes and musical individuality and decisions made and enacted? Mmm… maybe. Whatever the subtext, From the Devil’s Tomb lacks all the inchoate ostentation that has made Black Metal so goddamned de rigueur: The calls to Cthulhu, brandished roadkill, goofy self-same ideologue interviews, inverted cruciform and pentagrams as prevalent as stars in Midwestern autumnal night. Most interesting/provocative flavor here is the Hindi strings and percussion vocalist/guitarist Vetis Monarch incorporates into the program. Title track floats in tanpura waves, chimes tinkling amongst its motion. “Sardonyr” begins with tanpura, tabla, and sitar before scuttling into pure violence; the prefacing jingle returns during the piece as leitmotif adding propulsion and majesty to guitars that should never be sequestered to blasting monotony. Little things, large impact. But Big Picture here is From the Devil’s Tomb presents the sort of direction I imagined Watain would’ve taken with the ultimately disappointing and cartoonish Lawless Darkness. As Black Metal careens further into self-parody’s abyss, splintering off into user-friendly “Scooby Doom” ensembles (The Devil’s Blood, Devil, Ghost, etc.), its iconography assimilated/appropriated into pop culture’s meaning-stripping machine, it’s guardedly reassuring to take in an overtly satanic record that manages to keep mostly nonsensical dogma in check, and craft Metal that’s as notable for its frills as it is for its conspicuous lack thereof. [Stewart Voegtlin] Related
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