Melancholy, oh terrible melancholy. A rich tapestry of downtrodden deathly vibes slowly wafts our way straight down from Belgium. From haunted graveyards on cursed hills hidden in the mists of time. Holy moly, the things just looking at the album art might conjure up from nothingness and decay.
So indeed, we did it again. The RMR Review Desk picked up Nyrak‘s sophomore effort Devourer of All solely by the terrible powers of the ominous graveyard on the album cover. But – did it pay off? Looks can be deceiving. There may be more than meets the ear.
Those mischievous piano intros can seriously mislead you, I tell ya. Once The Eyes of Time led off into the void, we started relaxing. The folks at the Review Desk already forgot about the Potter’s field on the album cover and its sinister messaging. Thus, a brutal awakening happened once the Belgians let loose with a wall of sound with the chutzpah of a blackened Fleshgod Apocalypse. An arrangement taking sustenance from a panoply of Black and Death Metal influences, all mixed into one grimy metallic concoction. Boisterous riffing, roaring tremolos, thunderous blast beats, and the symphonic elements jockeying for the best position to be heard.
And all that mercilessly spews forth underneath an atypical vile Death Metal croak that sits straight in the middle of the mix. That’s one howling opener thundering about our ears right there. A grander-than-thou soundscape choked full of any and all instruments, the not-so-subtle orchestration, and miscellaneous samples to round it up.
In fact, as the tracks progress, this wall of sound thing morphs into an avalanche of sorts. To the point that the bass or – again – the rhythm guitar are often barely discernible. And that’s the main issue on Devourer of All. A production stuffed full like a fat goose about to hit the BBQ that seeks to kill you with all sorts of metallic ideas. The abrupt breaks into some haunting piano interlude or five won’t really help matters along either. The arrangement lurches from one sub-theme to the other on a blackened wave of endless blast beats and a somewhat uninspired drumwork overall. To add insult to injury, those ambient and acoustic interludes, whilst gothically tainted to a point, fail to fork over the huge pile of melancholy it was supposed to.
And those are shortfalls the RMR crew already encountered with a number of one-man-shows. Records where the sole master of the disaster often has a ton of ideas that – somehow – need to become part of the mix. And that often results in a rough production with an abundance of moving parts, plagued by a ton of impurities and brazenly cut corners that’ll end up annoying this crew. And sure enough, Nevel – the headmaster here – started the band off as an all-in-one. Malvs – their first full-length record – only saw assistance from Nihil on vocals. On Devourer of All, a full band seems to be at work with Lukas Risbourg (Serpents Oath) newly manning vocal duties apart from the lead guitar. And that’s a good start going forward.
The aforementioned The Eyes of Time not only is the can opener of the record but – for sure – also the filet piece. It appears that the band put all their savoir-faire into this here track and let the rest more or less bob in their wake. Except for Devourer of All – the title track – that valiantly tries to keep up with the headpiece. It is also that track where some gothic undercurrents do actually appear, but only scarcely so. The rest of the tracks aren’t bad but they didn’t really make us sit up straight either. In particular, Candlelight and Lament didn’t convey the doom-laden emotion promised by their titles. In fact, Meaningless gets closest to the gothically-tainted melancholic work a My Dying Bride would be good at. This track indeed turned into a welcome exception to what could have been. If only.
So, let’s try to fence that wild jambalaya of crazed soundbites in. Devourer of All rages and raves about the soundscape like a demented daemon. Which – in essence – is what the theme describes. And while the record isn’t bad, we just found too many impurities sitting on a bricked-up production. The whole record sounds like a heap of ideas thrown into a pot, heated to a point, stirred into submission, and pressed through a sieve. The outcome is a seemingly primordial soup of metallic elements driven forth by ceaseless croaks and listless orchestration.
Devourer of All is one of those records that drove me mad. I can see the talent, yet the whole chebang drowns in an overly immersive and overwhelming production full of swirling parts. If – next time – Nyrak can chisel out a razor-sharp production without bludgeoning everybody into submission, we should expect great things. As for this here piece, there’s decent material only for a good EP. And – maybe – they should have gone there for this sophomore piece.
Record Rating: 4/10 | Label: Phoenix Mortis Productions | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 3 May 2024