Interrogate yourself: love and hate are easy, but tepid enjoyment or moderate disappointment? Your book club doesn’t give a shit about that kind of weak sauce. Point being, it’s a hell of a lot simpler to raise a ruckus about the extremes: this album is the best thing since Quorthon summoned the eternal fuck-thunder, that album is worse than a wheel of Brie stuffed in a soiled diaper and stored under a radiator for a month, and so on. In writing about music, the average, the decent, the adequate – these are where the words dry up and the critical muscles fail.
Can you see where this is going? Christian Mistress‘s third album To Your Death is… fine. It’s pretty good (and a few times it almost gets very good), but mostly it’s just… fine. It may, however, be the first time in history when a band aimed for Thin Lizzy but landed closer to Alice in Chains, because as improbable as it sounds, To Your Death is very nearly an accidental grunge album. Where grunge took the drive of hard rock and heavy metal and subverted it by turning inward with equal parts soulfulness and self-loathing, To Your Death pulls a similar move, but seemingly without meaning to. The album doesn’t have a “Rain When I Die,” for example, but the ethos feels very early 90s, even if the outward aesthetic tilts 70s and early 80s.
Cut to the chase, dummy: Christian Mistress plays a loose-shuffling, straight-riffing throwback of trad metal and NWOBHM but on To Your Death they lack the necessary fire to live up to that heritage. The album does improve as it gets into the back half, but its first three songs are basically a wash of plodding tempos and sluggish rhythms. While on Christian Mistress’s previous two albums it was possible to pick out clear bits and pieces of influence from specific bands, on To Your Death they sound mostly like themselves. That cuts both ways, though: it’s probably better to plagiarize oneself, but when that self-plagiarism is as egregious as “Eclipse” (which is a barely disguised variation on Agony & Opium‘s “Desert Rose”), it’s a little hard to sympathize.
To Your Death‘s major problem is that it can’t quite commit fully to a given direction and thus lands in a tepid middleground. Late in the album they hit a nice stride of darker, moodier fare (the tandem of “Ultimate Freedom” and “Lone Wild,” in particular) that, if explored more thoroughly, might have made for a more interesting album. When guitarists Oscar Sparbel and Tim Diedrich really pull out their Gorham/Robertson pyrotechnics, they mostly feel ill-earned because the songs in which they appear are not similarly fleet or flashy.
Ultimately, To Your Death doesn’t do anything that Agony & Opium didn’t already do faster or that Possession didn’t already do better. There are no real anthems, no firestarters or shitkickers or breezy jams; the most engrossing songs are the ones where the band seems exhausted, worn down and sick but determined to press through each thickening measure. That’s an interesting tension, but it doesn’t exactly make for a stunning display of heavy metal vitality. The low harmonica rasp of Christine Davis’s voice is still a centering presence, but without the same hooks and energy as in the past, she cannot command.
“I had a vision, deep in my head /
That we were laughing, as we met our death.”
In music, as in life, there are disappointments. But even in those bruises and squandered moments there should be joy. A life of extremes is a glossy magazine spread, a phantom desire of late capitalism in self-cannibalizing spasms. Our days are finite, and each is a choice. Choose to know yourself, and it means knowing your whole self. The geological record is vast but vanishing, and neither are your exaggerations nor false ideas a concern to the clamoring firmament of indifference. Joy, even in this finitude; especially in this finitude.
That’s fine; you are fine; we are all fine.
