I genuinely feel like a sledge hammer has been reamed across my face after listening to THY ART IS MURDER’S newest album Dear Desolation (August 18, Nuclear Blast Records). It’s that crazy out of the gate. It’s like this band doesn’t even have any sort of brakes on the out of control heavy train that they keep chugging down the tracks, and with metal seeing more brutal bands slap clean choruses in, I’m super-jazzed on the fact that this is just pure goddamn evil throughout.
It’s actually kind of hard to orchestrate more words about this piece of art because I pretty much covered it all up there; but there’s beauty in that. There’s power in simplicity. There doesn’t need to be a full 120-piece orchestra on every track, and metric shit tons of effects (not judging if there is, that shit’s cool too), but it’s always cool to just crank up some amps with a great producer, add some atmospheric background noise, then blast beat it out until we hear those wonderful bass drops that signal all of us to violently bang our goddamn heads in traffic while onlookers stare nervously.
While I enjoy a good bout of progression in any band’s discography, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every single album you put out. THY ART IS MURDER doesn’t exactly tread all new waters, but they sure as shit didn’t stick to the same formula they used on previous albums. Let’s put it this way; they’re not making an entirely new dish, but they’re definitely using some different spices.
Solid release. Solid band. You really can’t ask for much more than that in this industry. It’s a very ‘complete’ feeling, almost prophetic orchestration throughout, with lyrics that convey a pretty stark and desolate sermon on organized religion (as far as I interpret the lyrics), which certainly kept my attention through the whole record. I like THY ART, I like what they did here, and I think the fans will too. Again, they didn’t go into the studio to change their whole sonic palette, or attempt to incorporate some crazy/radically different new style or techniques, they went to write a fucking TAIM record. That’s all we can we can ask of them, and they delivered.
(Last minute add on thoughts, the mix is fucking insane in its own right. Sounds so incredible.)
STANDOUT TRACKS: “Dear Desolation”, “Puppet Master”, “Into Chaos We Climb”
RATING: 9/10
-ZALEN CIGAINERO
