Crimson Massacre - The splendor of a death-metal pandemonium

“Of Sovran power, with awful Ceremony

(John Milton – “Paradise Lost”)

Just as happens, to some degree, in every genre, extreme metal too has its shooting stars: bands that lasted a handful of months, in the luckier cases a handful of years, maybe cutting a promo or two, or a single album (and in that case they could already call themselves lucky!), entrusting their hopes to some eventual posthumous rediscovery. Not every shooting star, however, deserves to be rediscovered, but if I'm here telling you a story, I evidently have my good reasons. Actually, one reason, but it's more than enough: The Luster Of Pandemonium, one of the hidden gems of death metal of recent years. It was recorded in 2005 by a band that even the sharpest radars have lost track of: Crimson Massacre. Since it isn't only the masterpieces that mark out the boundaries of a genre, but also, and perhaps above all, those lesser-known and "imperfect" records, rediscovering the latter can only be a duty, rather than a mere completist's indulgence...

Our story is set in Houston, Texas. The year is 2001, and guitarist James Jackson and drummer Robert VanVeghel are still in college when they decide to form a band. Things, however, move slowly, to the point that VanVeghel leaves, replaced by Scott Horne. In a short time, the line-up undergoes fairly rapid changes. Then, between 2002 and 2003, two demos are put together, containing tracks that would all (with the exception of "The Eternal Gates of Enoch") be revisited on their first "official" record. Self-produced, Temple Of Gore (2003; 62:07) (recorded by a quartet that, besides Jackson and Horne, included singer Joe "Krullenzith" King and second guitarist James Harkins) is a work clearly inspired by Scandinavian black metal (the cover of Emperor's "I Am The Black Wizards" alone would be enough to confirm it), though there's no shortage of melodic death-metal leanings that recall bands such as At The Gates, Sentenced or Dark Tranquillity. It's an immature record, one that shows musicians still in search of a precise identity. Right from the opening "A Midwinter Dream" it's clear the band hasn't yet come to terms with its own inspiration, fumbling between hysterical screams, cavernous growls and tremolo riffing that tends to saturate the space without much creativity. It doesn't help, moreover, that they use a drum machine, which flattens everything with an irritating mechanical effect. The absence of keyboards, which on the first demo added a far from negligible touch of atmosphere, is probably a point against a record that drags along all-too-predictable tracks, even if in a very few cases (I'm thinking, for instance, of "Enslaved On The Throne Of Chaos") the band's two souls manage to find a more convincing common ground. Rounding out the picture are two live tracks ("Hill of Skulls" and "The Forest of Lost Souls"), which at least have the merit of sounding more visceral and powerful, as well as more decipherable, at least compared to those, deafening and almost bordering on harsh noise, that had appeared on the second demo, The Gathering.

The splendor of pandemonium

In roughly four years of activity, Crimson Massacre had gained essentially very little traction, mostly because the quality of their music wasn't exactly memorable, even if a few years ago James Jackson said he was satisfied with the results achieved with Temple Of Gore. In the same interview, the guitarist was nonetheless keen to add that continuing within that paradigm would have been counterproductive for the band's fortunes. With the black-metal matrix thus set aside, and the consequent departure of the singer and the second guitarist (who would go on to form the entirely skippable Gates Of Enoch), the line-up (which had in the meantime added guitarist Bill Ledgerwood) was completed by the arrival of singer Pete Olen. "My other band," he recalls, "was on tour and Crimson Massacre opened for us in New Orleans. The guys had just started sketching out the first parts of the songs for their second record and were looking for a singer. So we talked a bit about the musical directions to take, and in the end I found myself flying to Texas to record the whole thing." But Olen's first experience with his new band was the split album As The Sun Burns (2004), shared with three Texan outfits. The scope is still that of Scandinavian black metal, delivered with barbaric fury by Bahimiron (close to certain atmospheric USBM tendencies), reinterpreted with vigorous death-metal spirit by Funeral Rites (the most convincing of the lot, truth be told) and flattened into "primordial" solutions by Adumus. Crimson Massacre, meanwhile, take part with four reworkings of tracks drawn from Temple Of Gore.

But it will only be with The Luster Of Pandemonium (2005; 52:51), preceded by a four-track demo, that these "new" Crimson Massacre will finally find their voice. Jackson recalls: "Writing and recording that record was truly something magical for us. Most of the songs came together between late 2003 and the early months of 2004, and the whole thing was recorded the following autumn. During that phase, having played live in some strange places, I think, helped us better focus our attention on the record's guiding idea."

Those who had followed the band from the very beginning certainly felt a sense of disorientation when they first heard this second chapter of theirs, released by Deathgasm Records. No more black metal or melodeath, and even less mechanical rhythms or jarring guitars. In their place, a veritable death-metal "pandemonium," extremely dynamic and seemingly indecipherable. Or, to put it in the words of the liner notes, a genuine "aural insanity," heightened by a production probably not up to the task (the bass sound, for instance, is buried too deep in the mix), yet still partly responsible for the record's high level of emotional oppression and "sonic" abstraction.

"I think it's fair to say it's a less 'mechanical' record compared to Temple Of Gore, especially from a 'rhythmic' standpoint. Still, behind the process of assembling riffs, scattered ideas, harmonic fragments, etc., there's still a rational approach at work, even if very often, almost as if by magic, many long, multidimensional guitar textures ended up blending together spontaneously, giving rise to a rather organic sound" (James Jackson). An approach that drew above all on their listening to classical music and jazz. Jackson again: "There's a predominant influence of classical music in the band. Personally, I listen to Bach, Wagner and Vivaldi quite often and study their arranging ideas; and I know that when Bill Ledgerwood was in the band, he had the same infatuation. As for jazz, we have a lot of modal fragments or 'bridge' connectors that partly nod to it, but the fact remains that most of the melodic phrases we use are inspired by classical music. As for improvisation, when you're trying to develop a passage, it can certainly play its part. Still, I don't like to improvise too much."

Structured as a single continuous sonic flow, albeit divided into 9 tracks, the record is built on a succession of micro-riffs played in rapid sequence by the two guitars, alternating symmetrical overlaps and sudden shifts, frantic spirals and harmonized phrases, so as to generate in the listener a sense of uncontrolled fury. The work's complexity lies precisely in this guiding idea of generating texture through a sequence of guitar phrases that remain poised between riff-generation and the simple counterpoint of more or less articulated and irregular figures. A precarious balance, sustained by drumming that, right in the midst of the storm, never flattens into the mere reproduction of a rhythmic beat, seeking instead pliable and unusual solutions. "I'm fascinated by whatever is performed at its highest level. Anything that, at times, is pushed to its limits produces interesting results, regardless of the discipline. I've always made that approach my own when composing and playing" (Scott Horne).

"Overall," Olen adds, "the idea was to create a controlled chaos, something that sounded as if it were always on the verge of collapsing at any moment, while actually always staying within certain boundaries." In this ongoing tension between centrifugal pull and rationalizing intent, Olen's own voice too — a hybrid between the stormy, lashing growl of singers such as Edgardo Gonzalez (Cenotaph), Tomas "Tompa" Lindberg (At The Gates), Necrolord (Liers In Wait), Oscar Dronjak (Crystal Age), and the luciferian scream of Pete Helmkamp (Angelcorpse) — marks another point of departure from the band's past. "There was a conscious effort to blend my voice with the music... an effort, in short, to use the voice as just another instrument, rather than picturing it on top of everything else, as happens in most death-metal bands."

In short, all the elements analyzed so far show just how deeply ambivalent a record The Luster Of Pandemonium is, a sonic edifice that can only be scaled with patient dedication, recognizing glimmers of melody right where the din of dissonance seemingly reigns, crossing floods or reservoirs of latent violence with the same urge to decipher them. But where there's ambivalence, there's conflict. And the lyrics, written by drummer Scott Horne, reflect on exactly this concept through the themes of the death of God and the advent of a new kingdom, something already underscored, moreover, by the record's title, in which that which gives life and clarity (the radiating light: "luster") is set in correlation with malevolent disorder, resistant to any attempt at decoding ("pandemonium" — not by chance, Horne is a great admirer of John Milton).

But let's get to the music. The opening "Catalyst's Tongue" is marked by a jagged succession of riffs, a whirlwind of dissonance and harmonic abstraction punctuated by adrenaline-fueled blast beats and scorching vocal onslaughts. It's a thoroughly programmatic opener, a sonic manifesto that calls to mind both At The Gates' "The Red In The Sky Is Ours" and Gorguts' "Obscura" and Liers In Wait's "Spiritually Uncontrolled Art." "Conquest" (which was the first song of the new era to be written) opens like a battering hurricane and proceeds alien and deviant, clinging to the maniacal interplay of Jackson and Ledgerwood, capable of generating a genuine stream of electric fire, in which most of the riffs stem from the crossing of rhythm and lead guitar, with the emphasis shifting between the two. Even more complex, "The Devourer" is a monster that breathes pain, dragging itself through ever more bizarre harmonic geometries, brutal implosions and melodic tears, while the lyrics seem determined, at all costs, to transfigure into spoken language the chaos that the music is erecting second by second: "Maelstrom of wings and fear collide as / the usurpers wade through ranks of the / fallen / hallowed ground fades away under the / march of the dogmatic hordes / swords drawn against impending odds, / hell-bent on reclaiming what was once / lost, / what was taken away, forbidden, for / daring to forge a different vision". The galloping solemnity of "Epoch," meanwhile, paints its dramatic canvas by letting discordant eddies, harsh instrumental conflagrations and draining detours converge, bringing in its wake the banner of an ambiguous triumph.

The eleven minutes of “The Hyperborean’s Epitaph” amount to a genuine coup de théatre, splitting the record's enigmatic brutality in two with an imaginative dissertation built around the interplay of two acoustic guitars, which proceed as if hypnotized until the coda is tinged with menacing electricity. “Bill Ledgerwood had a huge impact on developing most of the composition and arrangement of this track – explains Jackson -, and once it was finished it made sense to place it right at the center of the record”, almost, I'd add, as a genuine oasis of respite, a way of looking at the chaos that dominates much of the album as if from an unassailable shelter. Breaking the “hyperborean” spell comes the terrifying onslaught of “Redemption”, marked by an even more dizzying execution speed, making it almost a grind variant of what we heard in the first part of the album. The title-track, for its part, is the triumph of a sound forever teetering on the edge of the abyss, a sonic body in perpetual agony, much like the one thrashing beyond the twisted vortex of “Sacrifice”. An agony that increasingly cryptic lyrics cannot help but intensify:

The second of the first, ascended

as a nova to the morning star

betrayed by the kiss of 30 silver

seraphim,

to assume command of the torn and

tattered,

the luster of Pandemonium faded

a third of the fallen come to profound

enlightenment

to acknowledge the frailty of the

Argument,

to be nothing to none, Lords of the

void.

On “Of Perverted Hope And Fragmented Suffering”, finally, we hear some of the album's slowest passages. Across its more than ten minutes, the track pushes even further in terms of dynamism and structural variation. After a more convulsive first part, the second half is suddenly seized by a deconstructive fit, building to the apotheosis of the final two minutes, which comes close to the atmospheric, all-encompassing vanishing points of the Ulcerate yet to come.

(13/07/2014)

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