Ancient Death – Ego Dissolution Review

[Cover art by Maegan LeMay]

Now one certainly doesn’t need any special context to understand the appeal of Ego Dissolution, Walpole, Massachusetts-based Ancient Death’s debut LP after an EP and a split. If you’ll go ahead and cut to the chase with me: it’s an objectively outstanding death metal album and so much more than sick riffs and blast beats. Blegh.

Then again, as music lovers know, there’s something really special about connecting with a great album in that special context it seems to have been crafted for (or from). Autumn Aurora as the sun sets behind red-gold tree tops. The Mantle when the cold gray asserts its quiet dominance. “Them” as guests arrive for tea.

Ego Dissolution in the midst of an epic electric eyeball storm.

Just so happens there was a big ol storm happening when I sat to jot down my earliest thoughts on this record and I just can’t imagine a better context for it. The night sky was deep dark blue, filled with pulsating silver cloud cover, all beautiful and terrible and intermittently overwhelmed by staggering blasts of white light with thunder just behind that seemed to come from inside my house. I decided it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose that the Ancient Death gang recorded Ego Dissolution live in a single take smack in the middle of a colossal electric storm. All the signs are there. Well, except the giant eyeballs. (Used to be I’d appreciate the idea of a lightning eyeball storm as a fun idea for D&D or a Sci Fi movie, but these days I think I’m just glad it hasn’t actually happened. Yet.)

Ego Dissolution is mostly mid-paced death metal that somehow feels like it’s whipping and cracking along, which comes down to strong writing and a rhythm section that’s particularly dialed in. Even when Derek Moniz picks up the bpm with bassist Jasmine Alexander, the battery shapes the energy to lurch and surge like hailstone waves. It was one of the first things I noticed as I wondered how they made that middling tempo feel so alive, and then the storms just reinforced it.

Indeed, the notion of a storm and the energy it brings, the epic feel of raw electric power, is a central element to Ego Dissolution’s success. There’s definitely a lot of classic death metal here, including Morbid Angel in flashes, later Death, Deceased…, and maybe a million others that could generally describe Ancient Death’s sound, but the name drops that make most sense to me are probably Bolt Thrower playing Stargazer and sometimes The Chasm, because there’s plenty of that cosmic mysticism here, too. Of course, I don’t want to set up unrealistic expectations – Ego Dissolution doesn’t sound just like any of these and, besides, what Ancient Death does is very much their own, to be appreciated on its merit. I’m just trying to ballpark the sound and feel with the hope it will whet some appetites.

There’s a number of ways that Ancient Death builds on the wonderfully vigorous foundation laid down by the rhythm section. First, Jerry Witunsky and Ray Brouwer (the bitchin guitarist, not The Dead Kid from Stand By Me; that was Ray Brower) bring a seemingly endless supply of killer death metal riffs and melody that glow subtly with the spirit of epic and traditional heavy metal. Second, that spirit shines even more brightly in their leads and the way they make them. When one goes high and the other low, for example, it makes me think of those storm clouds again where lightning flickers low blue from the cloud body to bright white at the edges. It’s really a nifty thing and just one of the many ways this band sets itself apart by having fun with the details.

There’s intricacy in these songs that demand atmospheric elements and Ancient Death pulls it off beautifully. This really comes through when they slow things down and spread their wings with atmosphere and unexpected contrasts. Alexander’s clean singing on a couple tracks, for example, is a pretty big risk, but it plays so well. Likewise, the couple of breather tracks placed strategically in the running order to make the flow more dynamic, mirroring the thoughtful writing within songs. Clever sounds and effects are interspersed judiciously to fill in the small spaces. There’s no keys or synths listed in the materials I’ve seen so I’m guessing they emulate them with guitar. Beyond that, the depth of sound necessary to bring such simultaneously powerful and nuanced songs to life is realized through a production job that emphasizes vitality as much as volume and power.

Not sure I’d call any of this progressive or technical outright, but boy is there a lot here that fans of progressive and technical heavy metal are going to love. And, actually, to me, that’s the best way to do it, the kind of songwriting that incorporates odd time or angular rhythm not as an end but a means, because that’s what the song or the album flow needs. That commitment to the song is what makes Ego Dissolution, simply put, a bunch of kickass death metal songs. Those songs happen to also have a ton of fun across a wide range of mood and style and that makes for a dynamic and compelling death metal album.