Even though I have SiriusXM in my truck, I don’t often listen to it, unless I’m with the spousal unit listening to the Lithium channel, or just too lazy to connect my phone and listen to Spotify or all the promos I have on my phone.
But occasionally I’ll throw on Liquid Metal just to see what’s going on, or listen to Ian Christie’s ‘Roots’ show, and I have, every so often, I have heard a new band or song I have dug, which has led to checking the band out further. One such example is Arizona’s Wyrmhaven. I thought the name was cool, and the song was “Unrelenting Storms”. I found the song on Spotify, added it to my liked songs playlist on Spotify, and followed the band on social media.
Lo and behold, a few weeks later, the full album shows up in my mailbox, so I had to check it out. And what we have here in this confident, solid debut is a modern metal mix that does a little 00s metalcore, a little melodic death metal, a little black metal, a little death metal, a solid production and master ( from Zach Ohren), and some decent songwriting that ties it all together.
When listening to the album’s brisk 35 minutes, with all those elements, I get hints of The Black Dahlia Murder, Revocation, Darkest Hour, All Shall Perish, Uphill Battle, early Poison The Well, and other 00s metalcore pioneers. It’s not quite the pure homage as say, Victim of Fire from last year, as it’s cleaner and more solo-filled. And while they do all of those genres quite well, it’s a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ sort of situation.
Vocalist Steve Naemark has a higher register rasp, with the occasional bellow, and the two guitarists, Travis Skye and Nick Cown (Gravecarver), have listened to plenty of the above genres, and the songs are rife with solos, and as I mentioned above, Zach Ohren’s mastering sounds crisp and sharp, as all his 00s and 10s albums were.
The lead single “Unrelenting Storms” and “Beneath the Pale” succinctly sum up the band’s many influences, while other songs like “Violent Afterglow” and the more balladic closing duo of “Lifeless Oceans” and “Obsidian Gold” lean a little more blatantly into the 00s metalcore sound, or the more technical, melodic death sounding “Nightshade’s Embrace” stomping “Morning Star”, and burly, dommier “Pendulum faces”.
A solid debut, and I look for marked improvement on album number 2 should they stick together and keep making music.
