By: Daniel Jackson
Album Type:
Full Length
Date Released:
30/03/2018
Label:
Metal Blade Records
‘Exile Amongst the Ruins’ CD//LP//DD track listing:
1. Nail Their Tongues
2. To Hell or the Hangman
3. Where Lie the Gods
4. Exile Amongst the Ruins
5. Upon Our Spiritual Deathbed
6. Stolen Years
7. Sunken Lungs
8. Last Call
The Review:
Given enough time, any and every
band will stumble. Of course, there are degrees and scale to these things. Each
fall will come from different heights and will last for different distances.
After 25 years of growth and refinement, Primordial were long
overdue for something like ‘Exile Amongst
the Ruins’. The big picture issues have been covered in a number of places
already, but they do ring true: the album is longer than it should be, and the
overall feeling is that this was a really good EP stretched into a bloated,
clunky full length.
A narrow example of this album’s
larger problems lies in one of the album’s singles: “To Hell or the Hangman”. The song is built around a really great
song idea. The driving groove that serves as the song’s backbone is a brilliant
way for the band to avoid some of the rhythmic tropes the band have been
working with over the last 10-15 years. The central guitar idea is every bit as
good. It feels unmistakably like Primordial, but places
that sound in a new context and it all comes together beautifully. The problem
is that the band ride this great idea into the ground, going minutes longer
than they should have. Heart’s “Barracuda” is an all-time classic, but
nobody would listen to it if it were just slight variations of the opening
riff, with no break or chorus, for seven-plus minutes. No idea is good enough
to withstand that kind of repetition without diminishing returns.
One of the other nagging issues that
hurts ‘Exile Amongst the Ruins’ in a
general sense is Simon O'Laoghaire’s occasionally uneven performance. I have no
idea what happened here. I don’t know if he ventured a tad too far outside his
comfort zone, or if there were production issues, but there are specific
moments over the course of the album where things just fall apart. It’s
particularly noticeable thanks to the album’s natural-but-boxy drum sound. For
a frame of reference, the drum sound might be described as a heavier, updated
version of the sound on Satyricon’s ‘Nemesis Divina’, especially in the kick
drums.
For the most part, O'Laoghaire
sounds like his strong, feel-oriented self. But a specific example to
illustrate where his performance becomes a problem would be “Sunken Lungs”. The song is difficult to
get through because O'Laoghaire’s grove-shy and needlessly busy beat choice is
made all the more unpalatable by the kick sound. It feels intentional, but it’s
difficult to shed the feeling that he’s perpetually late coming in on the
downbeat because he’s frantically shoving as many notes as he can into the
counts prior to it. If it were a brief section or the intro, you could almost
wave it off, but it’s used as the general rhythm structure for the whole song. I normally wouldn’t have spent so much time on
this, but O'Laoghaire is usually a drummer I’m excited to hear more of, and
some of the choices he’s made on this album are a complete mystery to me.
As I indicated earlier, the story of
this album for me is similar to what you might have read elsewhere. There are a
ton of good and great ideas here, but some of those ideas get lost in
translation, and some are ridden for well past too long. Even when Primordial misfire, the end result is still a largely good
album. That’s where the degrees and scale I mentioned earlier come in. When Primordial put out their worst album in more than a decade,
it’s because they put out a good-but-not great album. This isn’t ‘Illud Divinum Insanus’ or ‘Cold Lake’. This is Primordial going
through some growing pains as they try new things. I have no doubt they’ll get
where they mean to go, but the start of this journey is a bit more rough than
they might have planned.
Band info: Facebook
