LANTERN Below CD

The older you get, the more you understand the passage of time. As a kid listening to Morbid Angel and Deicide one marvelled at the leaps their music took from Possessed and Hellhammer just a few years before, and the further dynamism of black metal a few years later. But this deified period from about 1984 to 1994 – so packed full of classics for the curious young metalhead – was a mere ten years. If we pluck another more recent arbitrary decade out and stick it under the microscope what does it reveal? Say 2004 to 2014. Of course the internet’s greasy fingerprints are now all over the way metal behaves as a culture, but its impact on the music itself is harder to measure. Thanks in no small part to the sheer volume of cross pollination that it facilitates, regional and national sounds melt away, and any truly revolutionary moments in music akin to ‘Altars of Madness’ are either ignored or buried beneath algorithms favouring more market savvy but inferior artists. But there are, despite all this, artists and sounds that are distinctively modern, or ‘post-2008’. It may not have a name yet, but here’s two more albums that have come to typify it. Finland’s Lantern offer a masterclass in how to make the ordinary seem unordinary through recording techniques with their debut LP ‘Below’, released in 2013. I may lack the vocabulary to fully do this justice, so we’ll do our best not to labour the point. At its core, this is frantic blackened death metal bent on atonal or minor chord play than anything more melodic or epic. It’s dark, fast, and rich. Riffs come and go at breakneck pace, with switches in rhythm or mood picked up without warning, and discarded just as quickly. So far so typical. The problem is that Lantern have opted for a mix on ‘Below’ that would be more fitting of funeral doom. Everything is covered in reverb and compression. The snare sound takes ages to decay, but the drums make more use of blast-beats than they do anything else. The guitar tone is one that lends itself to ringing chords, epically slow solos, and slow, building melodies, but for the most part they blitz past in a fudge of tremolo picking and shredding thrash riffs. Vocals again are an almost punk like bark of aggression, but they are so laced with cavernous reverb that they come across distant and foreboding as opposed to violent. So if those are the symptoms, what’s the diagnosis? Well, like much of the best in extreme metal, it’s a truly alien sound leaking from the speakers. It takes time to reach the right frame of mind to fully grasp what Lantern are going for. At first it feels like choices made in poor taste. But as one grows more familiar with music one grows accustomed to the finished work that takes shape over these base level aesthetic choices. What can seem like complete chaos can – without warning – bleed into patient and complex crescendos and overtures. And when those moments get going this album really comes into its own. What ‘Below’ lacks in dynamics it more than makes up for in the complexity and layering of the individual builds and falls as the music progresses. One really that the thing itself has a longer attention span than you, and the many secrets this music has been hiding slowly unfold. Rather than sitting passages of utter carnage next to more structured and disciplined moments, Lantern seem to mix and blend the two opposing forces simultaneously. The result is an unsettling but rewarding exploration of riffcraft. One that is enhanced by some clever and risky choices made around the presentation of the riffs themselves. It’s one of those rare albums (especially of more recent times) that truly does not sound like anything I have heard before. As opposed to many of their much lauded contemporaries that typify the times, Lantern actually better them. ‘Below’ is an album of risky choices that don’t make sense to the listener on first or even third listen. But once that zen state of equilibrium with the music is reached, its rewards are great. It’s a trait that is common to some of the best albums in extreme metal. Originally published at Hate Meditations