Massteron – Second In The Spheres Review

[Cover Art by Francesco Gemelli]

I need to make a confession to you, my friends. Lately, I’ve been taking a little break from pouring the sound of heavy metal into my ears. I can explain. 

First, I’m trying to get myself into shape for a 5k race, and I’m following a suggestion to leave the headphones at home during my runs. Those who know better than I do swear by silence during training runs, as it allows you to better monitor and maintain your breathing. And, you know what? Sadly, these experts are correct. But beyond that, a few hours of daily silence has become a welcome respite from monitoring the unrelenting chitter chatter of daily life. This headphone break also happens to coincide with a nasty case of swimmer’s ear I picked up while trying to impress my oldest kid by doing handstands in our community pool. Bottom line, my ears were already fetid cesspools of poo-born bacteria, I figured there was no need to go full Saló by subjecting them to the promo churn. 

At an even deeper level – I think I just needed the break. We’re all wired a little differently, aren’t we? I can tell you, sometimes when the conversation heats up in the Last Rites break room, I’m simply shocked to silence by the sheer volume of music our scribes can take in and hold forth upon. There are people who have not only heard every album by The Residents, Ulver, Queensrÿche, Manilla Road and Anathema but also have developed strong enough feelings about said albums to painstakingly rank them. These are not people who would not allow a little case of shit-in-the-ear to stop the music.

What can I say? I’m a guy who needs a break, the price of which is having to sit, aghast, on the sideline as my betters dispense knowledge at a rate far faster than I can mentally collate it. 

But, there are perks to being a no account, know nothing jackwagon who only gets to hang out here because God only knows why. One of them is that I am still, to an extent, consuming heavy metal as an idiotic child would. And let me tell you, that is just the fuckin’ way to dig into Second in the Spheres, the debut album from Poland’s Massteron. 

Has this style been done to death already? Is there actually a thriving clutch of bands emanating from Southern Lapland that make Massteron sound like pure amateurs? Is this just a Mastodon side project? I DON’T KNOW! I don’t know anything. Scratch that, what I can definitively tell you is that if you’re in the market for a black-verging-upon-death metal album that puts down stakes in the porous border between Pure Holocaust and Magnificent Glorification of Lucifer then this recording’s got something for you.

Let’s start at the top with “Void of Fire:” á la Inquisition, we get resonant minor chords laying down a harmonic bed for rapid-fire tremolo riffs and harrowing descents into half-time poundings. The drummer is not necessarily playing in a different band, but there are times where he batters the kit in a way that suggests he envisions an even more urgent version of Massteron, and that tension brings us either to a higher plane or a deeper circle, depending on what books you read as a child and how you feel about them now. 

“True Midnight” initially offers a more orthodox approach to blackened death, replete with fairly standard but ably performed tremolo riffs. But this track grows as it goes. Inquisition-style inverted chords stab through the mix, lending the track a sense of unembellished depth. We’re also treated to a raw but real-as-shit solo. The performance is drenched in reverb and not remarkably technical or even especially melodic, but it reaches absolutely skyward and is deeply felt and confidently shredded. 

Were it my job to hand out the biggest piece of chicken to Second in the Spheres’ standout track, then “Sideral Chaoskampf” would be chowing down. Here Massteron displays the full riff arsenal, frantic death-trash whole step slides into face-melting tremolo and pleasingly dissonant plucked arpeggios are the soup du jour, but we also get to take a brief sojourn to the black metal’s second wave via some pleasantly melodic counterpoint playing during the track’s back half.

Second in the Spheres isn’t without its moments of dudliness, of course. Achronon opts for a pure black-death approach, and is simply less interesting than the more harmonically adventurous tracks on offer here. “Omnispheros Majesty,” the album’s 11 minute closer, seems to me to run counter to the point of Second in the Spheres, accruing running time without building much depth, and spreading a Rhode Island-sized pad of butter across a North Dakota-sized piece of toast.

Those “yeah buts” aside, even somebody who knows nothing knows rips when he hears it, even if he’s got thimbleful of untreated shitwater sloshing around his ear canal. Second in the Spheres not only rips, it’s also musically interesting in a way that not-quite-virtuosic-but-genuienly-creative guitar music can be. And I’d bet that you, ye who never fucking relaxes, might like to get evil all the time with Second in the Spheres, as well.