Let’s get to the point: Absolution is a promising debut album all but ruined by its laughably out-of-place harsh vocals. On paper, Denver’s Khemmis is an appealing proposition: their fuzzed-out tones and love for Lizzy-descended licks point one way while their classic Sab swing and plaintive clean vocals point another, such that the whole package comes across like a stoner metal take on epic doom. To be pithy: Khemmis is almost cut from the same cloth as Pallbearer, if Pallbearer had been weaned more on Kyuss than Candlemass.
Where those two elements are both at their best, the effect is excellent (as on much of album opener “Ash, Cinder, Smoke”). However, when either aspect suffers, the stitching that holds Khemmis’s sound together begins to show its frayed edges. When the riffing is less engaging, the clean vocals aren’t quite strong enough to carry the song (see “Serpentine”). But even when the riffs are thunderous, disaster looms. The main riff of “Antediluvian” – particularly with its great interplay with the bass – might almost have strolled out of the best moments of Black Sabbath’s 13. But where that colossal doom riff could have led the band any number of directions, the latter half of the song is chock full of more shouting that seems intended to add intensity to heavier riffing sections, but instead saps all the instrumental finesse.
Thankfully, the harsh vocals aren’t omnipresent, but when they appear they are so outrageously ill-fitting that they overpower any of Khemmis’s many strengths. The extended coda of the otherwise excellent “Ash, Cinder, Smoke,” for example, finds some keen melodic guitar work slathered in over-enunciated Victory Records hollering. The clean vocals are less quavering than Pallbearer’s Brett Campbell and less heart-wrenching than Warning/40 Watt Sun‘s Patrick Walker, but they still land on that general turf. Album closer “The Bereaved” is probably the best song of the bunch, with the clean vocals at their most assured and soaring. It’s also here that the vocal melodies actually sell the emotional content of the song most effectively (although something about the vocal line sounds very much like Metallica‘s “Mama Said”).
Still, no matter the many strengths of Absolution, that ridiculous tough-guy shouting is always there to spoil otherwise tasty moments. To picture the hilariously stupid mismatch of these vocal styles, imagine, for example, Snoop Dogg at his absolute smoothest G-funk peak backed by Henry Rollins as a Flavor Flav-style hype man. It’s a terrible choice that distracts from songs and riffs that range from passable to very good.
Another quibble: “antediluvian” is a lovely word. Its etymology, of course, means “before the flood” – i.e., before the Biblical flood out of which Russell Crowe would improbably surf on so many timbers, i.e., a long fucking time ago. It’s a lovely word, though, both in sound and evocation, and so, to be frank, it’s obnoxious that Khemmis has deigned to pronounce it “ANTI! Diluvian!” as if they’re just really opposed to floods. Sodom gets an ESL thrash-pass for singing about the “EP-EE-TOOM of tor-chur,” but Khemmis, from ye olde Colorado, does not.
Here are some other fun options that you can pretend they are yelling:
– AnteDelorean: Robert Zemeckis’s pre-Back to the Future career
– Anti-Deneuvian: Film nerds not into French post-war cinema
– Anti-Spumonian: folks who ain’t having any of ice cream’s shittiest cousin
– On t’y de Louvre-ian: some nonsense about a glass pyramid
But we digress.
As a matter of policy and principle, bands shouldn’t listen to critics. As such, one hates to offer advice, but it seems that Khemmis could find a sweeter spot two different ways: they could ditch the harsh vocals and focus on strengthening the clean vocals, finding that hallowed citadel of epic doom riffs and powerful singing, or they could lose ALL the vocals, dial up the solos and hot licks, and dig into a similar groove of ’70s-fab instrumental metal as Philadelphia’s Serpent Throne.
Hopefully they do neither of those things and instead find their own damn way, but either avenue would be more satisfying than the fun but ultimately flawed synthesis that Absolution offers.
