Having said that, this album falls into a similar trap to previous Amity Affliction albums like Chasing Ghosts (2012) and This Could Be Heartbreak (2016), where they feel like inferior rehashes of the albums that preceded them, regardless of any innate quality. they were also shockingly solid when I caught them at the Good Things festival last year and I’m glad to see they’ve continued down that path on Not Without My Ghosts. The Amity Affliction’s unexpected return to form, by way of an even more unexpected, almost-unimaginable, yet also wholly evident and effective embracing of genuine, Cradle of Filth-inspired extreme metal on their last album, Everyone Loves You …Once You Leave Them (2020), is one of the more pleasant unexpected surprises I’ve enjoyed in recent years. It’s been diminishing returns for me and The Acacia Strain for some time now, but when The Amity Affliction are releasing heavier and more interesting albums than you, you know you’re in trouble. It would be an interesting experiment if they hadn’t already done this a decade earlier with Coma Witch already and also raises the question of why the band haven’t spent the years since working out ways to integrate their doom-inclinations into their trademark hardcore template, rather than insisting on their separation and unnecessarily gimicky presentation. It would be inoffensive on its own, but for some reason it comes paired with a second record, Failure Will Follow, which contains three tent-to-seventeen-minute long doom tracks that offer absolutely nothing redeemable across their combined forty-minute runtime. This brings us to the first part of today’s superfluous double-release Step into the Light, which is a fine, hyper-aggressive hardcore record in and of itself, but pales in both interest and impact when compared to contemporary offerings like the latest Jesus Piece or Brand of Sacrifice records. I haven’t gone back to it though, and it seems that-whatever their quality, The Acacia Strain seem far more interested these days in whether their song titles spell out an acrostic poem or whatever than making good, or even memorable music. I’ll give them Coma Witch (2014) as an interesting-if-ultimately-unsuccessful experiment, and their previous outing Slow Decay (2020) (which I had to look up the title of, despite that being the whole point of its release…) suggested somewhat of a return to form. All the albums they’ve put out since then though have left me largely wanting.
I love everything the deathcore pioneers put out, up to, including and especially Death is the Only Mortal (2012).
The main offenders are The Acacia Strain. For the most part, however, the results are far less than I hoped for. There are a lot of larger names putting out albums today, including many I consider longtime personal favourites. This is probably going to be more of a “State of the Roundup Address”, but I wanted to use this entry to talk about the overall quality of some of the bigger releases this week. Chaotic Upheaval by Pronostic Cattle Decapitation – Terrasite (progressive deathgrind) Personally, I'd take Chaotic Upheaval over anything any of those bands have released, and it's only really genre heavyweights Obscura and their various spin-offs that I'd give the edge to when it comes to the more traditional side of contemporary tech death. For the most part though, Pronostic draw their closest comparrisons from their countrymen in bands like Beyond Creation, Augry and First Fragment. The intro to "Drained by Remorse" also sounds a lot like Gojira's "Gift of Guilt". Oddly, that's not the only time the Welsh outfit were brought to mind, once I started listening for them. If there is one eyebrow-raising moment to be had, it's that the rhythmic section that kicks in halfway through the album's instrumental centrepiece, "Waves", is literally just the intro to Bullet for My Valentine's "Your Betrayal" with a couple of extra beats thrown in. Just because Pronositic aren't reinventing the wheel doesn't mean they don't come damnc close to perfecting it, while there's nothing innovative or surprising about Chaotic Upheaval, the album is made striking by its sheer quality. It's also probably better than 99% of other tech-death records ever released. This is progressive tech-death baby, complete with all the hallmarks of everywhere the genre's been and where it is right now. Track one begins with a spacey, fretless bass solo and it's not long before the sexy sax and choral backing vocals come in on track two. You know what kind of album Chaotic Upheaval is going to be from the moment you press play. Top Picks Pronostic – Chaotic Upheaval (progressive tech death)
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