In 2015, Chapel Of Disease put out one of the greatest modern death metal records I’d ever heard with The Mysterious Ways Of Repetitive Art. They added proggy and doomy flavors to their OSDM template with that disc. Last year, they dropped ….And As We Have Seen The Storm, We Have Embraced The Eye, and it capitalizes on these new aspects brought to the table a few years ago tremendously.
With that, you can expect the songs to be even longer, more details added to the atmosphere, and newer paths entirely being taken. For starters, it’s way cleaner than anything that they’ve ever done, which shows itself early on. The entire second half of “Void Of Words” focuses on bright melodies and clean guitar licks. Although the first half is still quite harsh, another song later titled “1000 Different Paths” invokes clean singing the whole way through backed by melodic licks. It’s the shortest song on the record (around six minutes), and has a lot of sadder vibes.
This is all interesting, and I give them props for being bold enough to make such a shift; but the issue is that Chapel Of Disease have all but lost their OSDM base. Calling ….And As We Have Seen The Storm, We Have Embraced The Eye death metal would be a stretch, even though there are a lot of abrasive riffs and harsh vocals. I’ll never take issue with an alteration in sound, but previously it was a perfect balance where now it injects too much of the fluff.
Something worth mentioning is the amount of post-metal that makes its way in. “Song Of The Gods” reeks of this the most, as there is tons of rhythm repetition, elongated synth backing, and a very gazey atmosphere. On the plus side, the solo tacked onto the end of this is possibly the best moment on the disc. Rest assured though, this does flood much of the album.
It would be very inaccurate to call this a bad album. The guitar licks are solid, the ideas are good, and I like that they weren’t afraid to step outside of their comfort zone. It’s just that the slight death metal hints behind all the newer integration didn’t sit well with me, and I found a lot of it to be a bit awkward. Very much worth at least a full listen, and I look forward to seeing what they do in the future.
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