By all reasonable metrics, I ought to love this album. I own every single Dream Theater album – even the shitty ones. I own every single Cradle of Filth album – even the shitty ones. In general, I’m a mopey ding-dong who loves fey, pretentious, overwrought bullshit. But we all have our limits, and apparently Citadel, the second album from Australian kitchen-sink metallers Ne Obliviscaris, is mine.
Superficially, though, there’s nothing terribly wrong with Citadel. The players are all extremely proficient; the album gleams with a bright, burnished modern production; the songs are portentously named and littered with obtuse but evocative lyrics; and the band moves successfully between a number of different styles and extrusions of heavy metal. The fundamental problem, then, is that Ne Obliviscaris is far too preoccupied with announcing its own profundity.
Given that plenty of well-respected, progressive-minded bands fall prey to the same failing, Citadel certainly stands in good company, and yet it never quite manages to impress enough to allow for suspension of disbelief. At times, it’s reminiscent of Disillusion‘s fêted Back to Times of Splendor, but elsewhere it sounds even more modern, a bit like Between the Buried and Me, or perhaps Animals as Leaders covering old Opeth. Throughout, however, the predominant feeling is that Citadel was made with great skill but little character.
The album’s first real song “Painters of the Tempest (Part II): Triptych Lux” (yes, that’s really the name – and that doesn’t take into account the fact that the lyrics are further segmented into Movements I through III) captures my attention only around the ten-minute mark, where the guitars engage in soloing consisting of exceptionally bouncy arpeggios, but then the song disappears into a turgid ambient section that breaks into an unearned crescendo. Although Ne Obliviscaris are to be lauded for attempting to write songs with real dynamics, the tools at their disposal are not sufficient to the task. In particular, the harsh vocals of Xenoyr are almost completely flat, and thus repeatedly rob otherwise climactic sections of their power.
Citadel is at its best, therefore, when it dispenses with perfecting its meta-architecture and just getting down to the business of heavy metal. As such, “Pyrrhic” is by far the most satisfying outing of the record – it hits a sprint immediately, and integrates Tim Charles’s violin in a much more satisfying way. The violin saws out an aggressive line, rather than being relegated to playing traditionally “pretty” melodies as a foil to the guitars, for example. But even here, “Pyrrhic” blazes like hell for five minutes, but then fizzles into directionless noodling that again sloughs off into a post-rock indebted crescendo that feels too rote to be truly engrossing.
Although Ne Obliviscaris move ably between passages of progressive death metal, black metal, ambient, chunky thrash/groove riffing, and lightly jazz-inflected pastoralisms, the overall effect is of an extremely generic “modern extreme metal” album. In attempting too much, they gain too little: Too much bluster, too many cringing harsh-to-clean vocal trade-offs, too much scene-setting, and yet too few riffs, too few truly satisfying payoffs, and too little identity.
Citadel is not a terrible album, and I can’t say that I hate it. However, it feels like market-tested metal: as if the band added up bits and pieces of as many aspects of metal as they could find and then took the mathematical average in order to appeal to everyone and offend no one. As such, I do not hate this album; I “nothing” this album, and I’m pretty sure that’s worse.
