December - The Lament Configuration - [Earache Records]

2002-10-17

What measure does a band take in attempting to create a successful meltdown of several musical genres and approaches, seeking for the common denominator to wrap their complex manifest with the requested sense of wholeness and unity? Usually, the best resolvement for such a state is hiring an experienced, professional producer to advise on the manner, adjoining their plentitude of ideas to a singular coherency. December picked Devin Townsend in order to complete the mission. And what a choice it is!

December’s musical style strives to achieve a steady grip on the conjuction between grind and hardcore on one hand, to Thrash and Death Metal on the other. In the effort of assisting the band to achieve their own legitimate, stout stand in the midst of stylish fragileness, it seems that Devin Townsend had made the right decision by shaping the bands characterizing sound in the icon of his own personal work, bestowing their composition with his known distorted, fusy, industrial, frentic ultra sonic presentation.

And indeed, Townsend’s unhly providence has tremendously helped December to issue a solid extreme Metalcore creation. The described productional attributes are applied by shockingly hectic, disintegrated phrases of technical aggressive havoc. Most of the pieces feature a dynamic sequence of perfectly performed altering Metal riffs, sharing the common trait on incoherence and deconstruction. Some of the rhythmical and melodical ideas do repeat at times, though the band successfully avoids the genre-prevailing linearity and maintains the interest in each and every track, consistently inflaming the apparent captivating tense bewilderent, by applying numerous rhythmical issimetrycal, inverting twists and turns to the reccuring musical motives. Also, the swift movements between different feels and riffing approaches, most notably switching from heavy chugging bassy riffs to miniature frictions of fabulous melody and instant blaze of opposingly aboundant harmonies, creats the unbelievably frustrating emotion of an illusive catharsis, being always thinkable and imaginable, yet never actually reachable, eternally sticking to its wretched slippery alledgedness. The accomulation of the aforementioned fashion renders the music to be a demonic revelation of sequential insequence, a longing for longing, the yearning of a yearn. Perhaps, in their next album, the band will grant us to reach the ultimately searched catharsis? For some reason, I’ll have to take the skeptical approach on that matter. Highly recommeded, for those who withstand.

Tom Orgad