Necros Christos – Doom Of The Occult Review

2011 is shaping up to be a banner year for organ in heavy metal, what with Negative Plane, Acid Witch, Blood Ceremony, and even the typically accordion-and-ennui-ensconced French getting in on the action via Moonreich. Now Germany’s Necros Christos joins the party, honking like Bach on downers during Doom Of The Occult’s interminable interludes. Perhaps the first thing you will notice, if you investigate this album, is that it features 23 (!) tracks spread across 73 (!!) minutes. Now, I can probably count on two hands the number of albums that deserve to exceed 70 minutes’ playing time, and this is not one of them. (Woods Of Ypres, I’m also looking sternly in your direction…) This is droning, plodding, defiantly monochromatic death metal with great soaring pretentions to being a profoundly occult musical statement that instead falls flat on its overstuffed and mind-bogglingly dull face. Essentially, a textbook case of Trying Too Hard.

Before you get all huffy, please keep in mind that I’m not generally one of these internet generation assholes who live and breathe only for irony, post-irony, and meta-post-irony, for whom sincerity and hard work are nothing but qualities to be openly mocked rather than praised or imitated. But the problem is, I can hear Necros Christos’s gears cranking so damn loudly throughout the background of the album. Great music typically requires artful composition, but then equally important is the ability to erase the lingering traces of that artifice.

But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Doom Of The Occult sounds great, with a nice thick guitar tone and deeply resonant bass. The kick drum is a bit weak-sounding, but the overall sound is full and clear, with every riff cleanly articulated. If anyone (*ahem* Metal-Archives *cough*) tries to tell you that Necros Christos is some kind of black/death hybrid, they are stupid and they are liars and they are not to be trusted: This band is pretty straight-on death metal, with the tempos hovering mostly around the crypt-crawling creep of the doomier stylings of Incantation, Coffins, Hooded Menace, or maybe a half-speed, shit-boring version of Nile. The vocals are invariably delivered in the same relentlessly rhythmic fashion as Glen Benton. The tempo is never the same, nor is the almost sing-songy delivery of Benton’s Deicidal barks usually there, but there remains a nearly unbreakable lockstep between the vocals and the guitar riffing.

The plentiful interludes are consistent, with the “Temple” segments featuring organ and occasional chanting, while the “Gate” interludes are almost sitar-sounding acoustic guitar pieces. These interludes aren’t really bad, but they are completely superfluous, particularly the shitty little 20 or 30 second snippets of organ. (“Gate 2” and “Gate 4” are both more interesting, drawn-out interludes, with flute, acoustic guitars, and some tabla-esque drumming. They sound more like they should slot into one of Karl Sanders’s solo albums – well, the good one, at least.) They might have been able to break up the flow of a really intense metal album, but they can’t do anything here for the fact that all of these songs are internally monotonous. Where Necros Christos excels is in penning some groovily catchy death/doom riffs in essentially every one of the proper songs. Where they falter, however, is in doing much too little to vary those riffs, leading individual songs to sound great at first, but eventually to massively overstay their welcome.

I mentioned previously that this album sounds great, meaning it has a very clear production, which of course sounds all for the good. Doom Of The Occult actually suffers from a rather strange inversion: Too much contemporary death metal (especially of the creepy-crawly, occult death/black Incant-olation variety) masks rather effective songwriting with intentionally poor production. Necros Christos, on the other hand, has a nearly pristine production which ends up dooming (har har) the record to easier scrutiny of the songwriting, which just doesn’t hold up. The implication, therefore, is that a dank and murky production job on this same exact batch of songs might make it easier to overlook the flawed songwriting. (That having been said, very little could have been done to make me overlook the fact that this album’s 73 minutes feel like 8,000 minutes.) Let me put it in purely scientific terms: This album has no balls. Necros Christos seems to desperately want Doom Of The Occult to be an atmospheric, claustrophobic journey to some shadowy nightmare kingdom, but for an ostensibly extreme metal album, there is very little that is either intense or extreme about the album (apart from the intense difficulty of sitting through the entire record multiple times). Instead, this is, quite frankly, boring and utterly internally predictable, and sounds more like a one-man band than any other death metal I’ve heard recently.

And look, I know it’s a four piece band, and I’m not trying to denigrate the individual members’ contributions, but this whole stinking mess sounds like one guy cooked up a grand vision of an Album before any music was ever written, and then essentially retroactively filled in riffs and drum fills and slow, high-school-talent-show guitar solos around the sides to mortar up the brickwork of Concept and Vocal Up-Front-itude. Rarely is the bass doing anything different from the guitar, which is rarely doing anything different from the drums, all of which are arranged too comfortably around the outside beats of the vocal rhythms (see “Hathor of Dendera” for a “good” example of this). This is essentially the same problem I have with last year’s Dawnbringer album (which still does absolutely nothing for me): both albums are so transparently composed (in both senses of the word). The compositions are, in fact, meticulous, but that translates to every single song sounding like it was metronomically-plotted and scribbled out on blank staff paper before ever having been played; this is essentially an anti-jam record. Consequently, nothing feels spontaneous, improvisatory, or unexpected. If you close your eyes, you can essentially visualize the structure of the songs as they are played – “Okay, we’ll play this riff through four times across eight measures, while you, Mr. Drummer Man, play a little fill to bridge us into that first and fourth measures, and after that, we’ll slip directly into the half-time section, where we play the same riff slowed down, and repeat it FOR GODDAMN EVER.”

Most of the guitar solos also end up sounding very much the same, modeled on frequently ‘Eastern’-sounding scales (I don’t know my Phrygian from my Mixolydian, so I’m stuck giving Edward Saïd a posthumous heart attack) and using similar flourishes (see “Succumbed to Sarkum Phagum,” “Invoked from Carrion Slumber,” and “Necromantique Nun” – really, guys?), and while I’m sure there’s probably some grand numerological/magickal/kabbalah-ish significance to having 23 songs on both the band’s full-length albums, honestly, who gives a shit?

The most unfortunate consequence of the unbearable monotony of this album is that when notable moments do crop up, like the massive riff breakdown into (yet another) slow section just before 3:00 into “The Pharaonic Dead,” their effect is blunted tremendously by one’s active interest having long since been beaten down by a parade of individually okay-to-good but collectively tedious songs. By the time “Descending into the Kingly Tombs” rolls around, I can no longer decide if the way that the vocals follow the exact same line as the guitars is completely obnoxious or totally awesome. In fact, this song may be one of the best on here (despite the fact that when it kicks into the album’s fastest tempo the drums sound clipped as shit, and the band sounds like it’s about to fall apart…), but because my will to live has been so sorely sapped by having already sat through, what, 64 minutes of this rather mediocre mess, all critical faculties have dribbled out my nose and I have melted into a loose gelatinous sac of protoplasm.

Sometimes playing slower can make every note and musical phrasing seem weightier and more impressive; Here, the attention focused on each note by both the too-slow pacing and crystal-clear production actually detracts from the impact, making each note, each riff, each snail’s-pace solo seem insufferably ponderous and hesitant. If one removes all of the interludes, the album is mercifully reduced to 54 minutes, but that’s probably still almost 20 minutes too long. Somewhere within Doom Of The Occult is buried a rather tidy 35 minutes of reasonably satisfying death metal trying desperately to escape from excessive structure and insufficient variation. Extreme metal is a nasty business, yet we are drawn to it, because even when this art form is spiteful, miserable, caustic, antisocial, nihilistic noise, the very best of it remains imbued with a certain vitality and intensity that verges on joyfulness. Doom Of The Occult demonstrates the will-sappingly dull results of a band in pursuit of all of the sound and fury, yet which has found none of that grace, and none of the joy.

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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