Review: Weapon – From the Devil’s Tomb
Weapon - From the Devil’s Tomb (2010) [The Ajna Offensive] // Grade: A
Unholy improvement! The follow up to Weapon’s last album, Drakonian Paradigm is From the Devil’s Tomb and the contrast between the two albums is like night and day. From the beastly album art by Ben Vierling to the production, everything about From the Devil’s Tomb is a fucking home run. The riffs and song writing have improved and there’s a visceral image painted in each cut off the 54-minute death metal feast. Rip apart the carcass and dive right in, it’s feeding time!
If you can’t finish or don’t like the first track, “From the Devils Tomb” then fuck off and die. This is death metal. Gnarly vocals, precise riffage and brutal drums. Weapon’s blackened death metal sound is something to live up to. For a real spine-tingler, “Bested in Surplice and Violet Stole” is here to add a bit of melody and craft to the mix right before a barrage of blast beats. “Furor Divinus” picks up with some ridiculousness. Straight high-octane ferocity with some borderline comedic vocals. My hands-down favorite cut to the wrist is “Vorter – 11724″. Bask in the band’s hailing chants to the dark lord! As per the program, you can’t have a blackened death album without an instrumental ballad like “Lefthandpathyoga”. Coming in at a solid 8-minutes is “The Inner Wolf”, an homage to classic death metal. This is where Weapon just annihilates everything in their path. Straight-up Morbid Angel worship.
The one thing that caught me off guard on this album was the Hindi-influence on “Sardonyr”. I get it, it’s just out of place if you ask me. One of the things I despise about a lot of modern death metal is shit like this. It’s not that there’s no place for it but it doesn’t mesh well with the flow, especially with the rest of the track. What about a blast-beat battering ram makes you want to precede it with a sitar? Let’s not get too hung up there however because the rest of From the Devil’s Tomb is not to be missed. “Trishul” and “Towards the Unereated” take elements from death and black metal, leave all the cowardice, stage antics and garbage behind. As pop culture begins to envelop black metal, bands like Weapon prove that it’s best to just blast them into oblivion. Take what’s best from the genre and mix in a healthy dose of death metal! From the Devil’s Tomb is a powerhouse. A well-crafted, blackened dose of death metal that’s not to be missed.
November 17th, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Interesting to see this review on here, and it’s good you like it a lot but I think you miss a huge part of what it’s all about. Firstly, I’m going to be really pedantic and take issue with you keep callign it death metal first and foremost; this is not blackened death metal. It is black metal above everything. It is enlightened, left hand, Satanically ritualistic blast beat Black Metal. Secondly, this album is steeped in easten occultism, hence the sitar. it’s not the blast beat that invites it in, it’s the entire albums worth of lyrics about the Shakti – lefthandpathyoga a reference to the occult union of the dark side of the tantric path, while the rest of the album discusses the amorality of yoga, the parallells of sexual ritual betwen the tantric and wsten witchcraft and satanic ritual. There’s a lot of echoic vocals and chanting here, again ritualistic and monastic in an eastern fashion. The entire alvbum uses middle eastern and asian scales in the riffs, so when you hear the sitar, the notes it is actually playign are int he same scale and key and others already played by guitar throughout. Most of this band have Eastern origins so I don’t think it’s as much of a tacked-on gimmick a you think.
All that said, I realise you say you get it, so you probably already do get all this, but you didn’t explicityly mention it, and it it all more fuel for why thi album is such a significantly different release this year. See also Witchrist’s ‘Beheaded Oroboros’ for some disgustingly filthy eastern occult oriented sludgy doomy death metal.
MxBx
November 17th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Put that album cover on a t shirt!