Archspire – Too Fast To Die Review

[Album artwork by Shindy Reehal]

Back in 1978, upon the release of their self-titled debut, Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau panned Van Halen for making music that “belongs on an aircraft carrier.” It’s one of those lines that was legible as a diss to Christgau’s urbane readership, but probably came across as a salutation of the highest order to the legions who got it.

Right now, a lot of people get Archspire.

242,473 monthly listeners on Spotify.

562,000 YouTube views on “Carrion Ladder,” the lead single for their forthcoming fifth full-length album Too Fast to Die.

More than $280,000 raised on Kickstarter to fund and independently release Too Fast to Die, with a remarkable $125,000 raised in less than 12 hours.

It’s difficult to determine what constitutes success for a technical death metal act, ‘specially in a media environment that resembles a porcelain figurine spiked onto a travertine countertop. And yet, it’s hard to deny that 16 years after the release of their debut EP, “All Shall Align,” Archspire have kinda “made it.” Harder still to deny that they’ve earned it.

This is a very, very talented band. Even judged by the exacting standards of their genre peers, the Vancouver, B.C. quartet sits comfortably in the upper percentile w/r/t speed, dexterity, and complexity. But, Archspire’s greatest skill – beyond the sweep arpeggios, land-speed-record-defying blast beats, and even the mind-bogglingly red-lined yet articulate vocals of Oliver Rae Aleron – is their ability to serve their fans.

They make music to breathlessly utter “holy fuck” to. To “guess the BPM” in the comments. To inspire terabytes of play-throughs, tutorials, and gobsmacked reaction vids.

Just listen to “Carrion Ladder,” which provides the full-spectrum Archspire experience. It begins a cappella, with Aleron’s M134 Minigun vocal delivery setting the table for an explosion of mondo-techicale instrumentation that makes me wonder if my instruments ever dream of growing legs and running off to the home of a real musician. This track is a monster-truck vaulting over 12 flaming school buses before getting swallowed by a Greenland shark, then being shat out in the form of a vending machine that only dispenses Four Loko.

There’s a lot of that feeling in the opening rounds of Too Fast to Die …

• The vocal battery at 4:30 of “Liminal Cypher” that would make John Moschitta Jr. blush.
• The bass solo break into a near-symphonic eruption of tremolo at 1:00 of “Red Goliath.”
• The attack of everything faster, louder, and trickier than everything else, and all at once, at about :30 of “Limb of Leviticus”

Archspire are savvy enough to recognize they’ve got to work some slow and sweet into their repertoire to round these moments into form, so we get the rib-sticking melodic refrain in “Red Goliath” and the symphonic black metal surge in “The Vessel.”

But just as Cristgau’s “aircraft carrier” dig read as praise to Van Halen fans, my description of Archspire’s strengths may scan as weaknesses to the readership of Last Rites. I say “effortless mastery” and you ask “what about the raw, bloody, and embodied human effort that lowers the interpretive drawbridge between artist and listener?”

After being utterly impressed by the initial barrage of Too Fast to Die, I kinda find myself across a divide from Archspire, wondering what it is they have to tell me other than “we are exceptionally fuckin’ sick at technical death metal.” As the album proceeds, the eyes-widening and jaw-clenching moments are lost in a concrete mixer of monochromatic hypercompetence. To narrow the critique just a little more, Archspire’s style of uber-techy and plenty-melodic riffing paired with a pristine but clinical modern production simply cannot help but land as a touch safe and a tad anodyne to ears that yearn for something a little more ripped and torn around the edges. 

One man’s critique is another fan’s selling point. So, if I were to say something like “Archspire’s music belongs on an aircraft carrier,” it doesn’t follow that I’d discourage you from hopping on board. And just because I haven’t fully seen the light, doesn’t mean you won’t feel the heat.