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Septicflesh – Titan

Jun 21 • International News, Reviews, The Slumbering Ent • 2996 Views • No Comments on Septicflesh – Titan

Deckard Cain reviews the new album from Septicflesh titled Titan, released via Season of Mist / Prosthetic Records.

Artwork by Seth Siro Anton. More of his work here.

Who would have thought that the mere removal of a textual blank character would have brought such a drastic difference in sound and execution? And yet Communion is probably the album that brought, the then newly christened Septicflesh, onto the metal mainstream. The inclusion of an entirely professional orchestral team, The Prague Philharmonia, and a fully fledged choir in an album, reveals the sheer scale attempted at. Communion was in scale, a thunderous cloud whose scope was defined by every ray of light it let through, which was indeed none. An achievement unprecedented, but truly their own. Sadly it’s the band themselves that has suffered in its success. Their equally of note back catalogue went criminally underappreciated. The melodic mid-tempo death metal with which they started out had an endearing quality to it. It did not rely on the speed or brute force the genre often banked on but an execution that differed in its substantially mid-paced delivery, intertwined with the sort of ethereal Greek melody that seem to have cultivated into their riffing. Mystic Places of Dawn, Esoptron, The Ophidian Wheel (all 3 almost similarly revered as the Rotting Christ’s first 3) and later on in the Sumerian Daemons were all exercises in a similar manner. The riffs were definitely the bread and butter of the build.

Post-Communion, the priorities seem to have changed. Flamboyance here takes the fore, the riffs play second fiddle. A hitherto, untried reliance on orchestral symphony and choirs were brought in to take songs forward. The results were obvious on Communion which was a great balance of the unhinged brutality of rightly done death metal and the almost surreal sense of majesty that an orchestral ensemble brings to the table. But on the next release The Great Mass the shortcomings became apparent. A deliberate choice by the band indeed, but perhaps something that caused the band to tone down to provide space for orchestral leanings, but to me it watered down the output considerably.

This becomes all the more prominent on their latest release, Titan. The orchestral elements played out by the Prague Philharmonia sounds even more detailed and grandiose. Definitely one of the charms of the album that will make a prospective listener out of anybody into metal, at least for a while. Seth’s vocals sound deeper and commanding than ever and a production value that has honestly never sounded better. Yet beneath all this exterior gloss lies a weak inner body that’s meek and devoid of any sense of overarching structure. The guitars, save for a few surprising moments fail to elicit any character of its own. Christos seems to have invested all his time into carving orchestral melodies up to the very borders of its permissibility, and yet in the end sounding all the more soulless without the quintessential guitar juxtaposition.

Titan is a mansion of architecture exquisite, reminiscent of the middle ages, dulled by the exhibits held within. The few exhibits that are indeed present are either both a bit too lurid and lacking in direction or slapped by a shade too pale to bear. The first three singles – Burn, Order of Dracul and Prototype alludes to this very fact, and they were spot on. Much of the album seems to be the product of your typical Septicflesh ingredients poured into a half formed mould. The track Burn for instance is equal part awful (chorus) and beautiful (bridge section). Order of Dracul and Ground Zero have stellar infectious choruses but fall flat as complete songs grown tepid by flavorless riffing. The only exceptions to the rule are Dogma and Prometheus, two brilliant tracks in their own right. The former includes, what is quite possibly the best moment in the album, the bridge section, where the choir wells up, decimating the monolithic riff preceding it, and unleashes on the listener this beautiful melody steeped in all things majestic. Prometheus for its part is the strongest song on the album, where nothing is compromised for the sake of juxtaposition of dull and melodic parts. I do secretly wish there were more songs like Dogma and Prometheus around and not this foray into vapidity masquerading as new direction.

Septicflesh has for me personally, suffered a dip in quality which was hinted at in the Great Mass and realized now in the Titan. A turn to the rakish and the sightless. A movement towards the more orchestral and the classical, all at the relegation of character. The hype train has not yet derailed but is forcefully dragging itself towards the maintenance yard.