Esoteric Tales of the Unserene is the type of album where I can appreciate what the band is trying to do, and where I can enjoy some of the things, but overall, it wasn’t an album I absolutely loved.
I’d describe that music as slightly progressive melodic death metal, which can be either heavy or melodic and tries to make complex songs about the wanderings of the human mind. The concept is interesting enough.
To its credit, the album does the complex and ever-changing songs thing pretty well. The songs all use some different ideas, such as the crushingly heavy Celestial Nights which ends on a quiet flute melody, the crazy speed of Vortex Vultures, the clean singing at the end of Flesh Was Carved out from the Seven Faces of God and the complex riffs of Flawless Anomalies.
Most of it is pretty nice. There are some good ideas, but yet, overall, this album doesn’t feel all that great. After the first two tracks, it ends up being a lot more interesting than it seemed to be at the beginning. While the first songs were somewhat unremarkable, a bit paint-by-numbers melodic death metal tracks, it’s with the third one that they start introducing some interesting ideas.
Other than that, the other songs are often a bit too generic. The vocals are well made but unexceptional growls that tend to sound the same on every song (the clean vocals were not done by the lead vocalist). Some of the songs that I didn’t mention are not bad, but not exactly great either, and I’m not sure what they were going for with the last track, The Great Calm Embraced. It’s not calm, it’s a yet another generic melodeath track that doesn’t really change its tempo or melody, and ends on a weird hissing sound. Even the songs I like, I wouldn’t exactly consider them great.
So this is another album that could be considered nice but not exceptionally good. There are some good individual tracks, when listened to as a whole, it doesn’t feel all that great. You can try the better songs if that’s your thing, but maybe don’t expect too much. It’s a nice album, but not one you should expect a whole lot from.
If you really would like to support Antichrist, you can just Share our article.
You can also support Antichrist by sending a couple bucks to cover some webhosting expenses. =>> PayPal
