Stepping foot inside of a brand new world, to most, can be a very scary obstacle to overcome, let alone facing it head on. As the newest member of The Ripple Effect, I knew that I had to review something so gigantic, so large in scale that it would take nonstop drilling of my brain to understand everything that was being fed to me. I wanted a record that would tie my hands behind my back and force feed me garbage that tastes like paradise. I wanted something so raw that my neighbors would have to call the Sebastian County Police Department and complain that the echoing disturbance coming from my house sounded like someone was being thrown around by some mysterious force. With that said, Atriarch's Forever The End was the most suitable record that I could see fit for the occasion.
As I gear up and try to prepare myself for what's about to happen while I listen to this record, I couldn't prepare myself for what actually happened. Forever The End, the debut onslaught of mayhem from this four-piece, delivers some of the most monstrous and hellbent chords in the world of Blackened Death/Doom and a very small pinch of Crust. While this record might be a shaker and a roller in the world of metal, I can't help but think that this four track behemoth of a record is anything but spiritual. Maybe not spiritual in the sense that it's praising a higher power of some kind because is definitely not the case here, but more in the sense that it completely takes the listener to another world. A world filled with outstanding gloom, dark shades of gray that litter the ground and even though the world you just stepped into seems calm, chaos reigned behind and above you as clouds started to evaporate into rain drops of acid.
Forever The End, overall, is a nasty, filthy, disgusting piece of art. Some might say those words are negative but to me, those words are the best ones to use when describing how this record feels, not sounds. Don't get me wrong, the record itself does sound disgusting, in a good way of vibes, but it also feels very filthy and muggy. The third track, "Fracture", should be the example you look at when you try to find the outrageous scum that dwells inside Forever The End. "Fracture", along with the whole record really, provides very sluggish sections that will make you feel as if you are being drowned in misery. In the past I've been very vocal and opinionated that with the majority of Blackened Death/Doom releases, the guitarist(s) need to step their game up in major ways. I may be the only one that feels this way but the bass and drums are what really make a doom record sound like it does and Forever The End is no different. The way that the drums literally vibrated the cup of water on my desk while this record was playing, blew me away. On the flip side, the drums, or what I call them, the soundtrack to Satan entering a room filled with worthless humans, also deliver on a scale that nobody can touch nor disagree with that they sound exactly what hell looks like, in a good way.
This record provides things, as mentioned above, that I really haven't felt since I listened to Meth Drinker's self-titled debut record earlier this year. The vibe you get that everything around you is collapsing into a burning pit of flames while the smell of burning flesh is heavy fogging the air in front of you. Forever The End and Atriarch both have laid waste to everything I wanted in this record. It has the atmosphere, the horrible disease ridden riffs that will make the pictures that hang on your hallway wall fall, only to shatter into tiny pieces and this overwhelming burden to just keep blasting this record until it melts, literally.
So, as I sit confused as to what I just heard from this record, yet I completely understand and latched onto everything that was thrown at me, I ponder the question to myself along with asking you, why can't every single record I come across sound like Forever The End? Simple question, right? The only answer I can give you is that most bands, to me, want to make it huge without much effort. That most definitely isn't the case with Atriarch because if I'm judging this band from this debut full-length alone, I can't see why they won't be featured in the most popular metal magazines or be put on tours with the bands they've looked up to for years. Atriarch - The one band that grabbed me by my throat the second this record started to spin.
Buy the record here: http://atriarch.bandcamp.com/
-Nicoali
