Artist: Into Eternity
Label: Century Media
Released: 2008
Rating: 3.5/5
Into Eternity are fresh, young, hungry, highly creative progressive metallers from Canada. That’s not exactly breaking news anymore, but the band still never fails to blow us away with their bursts of creative energy!
Into Eternity are no walk in the park. They’re not for just any pair of ears. Their sound is technically highly complex. The songs are built on polyrhythms and bursting with different motifs. These guys fuse classic heavy metal standards loaded with the melodic touch of Painkiller-era Judas Priest and the old-school stubbornness of Maiden’s triple-harmony guitar lines, and then stack on top of that a dose of brutality that only the toxic, rustic voltage of thrash metal from fellow Canadians Exciter can produce, while the vibe of the chorus in A Black Light Ending even brushes up against Nevermore. All wrapped in a modern production march that the studio really gets. Everything about Into Eternity is that much more complex and harder to pin down thanks to the combination of three different vocal approaches. The first example comes right away in Tides Of Blood, and an even nicer and more direct showcase of this “triple face” is, say, Diagnosis Terminal. Here we get hit head-on three times: with extremely high yet explosively clean wailing, packed with melodic articulation, from singer Stu Block (want some first references? Those heights summon the spirit of John Cyris (ex-Agent Steel), Warrel Dane from the Sanctuary era and, of course, Tim “Ripper” Owens). Parts like that can turn, completely unexpectedly, into low-to-mid-range core screaming in the very next moment. And on top of all that, you can’t miss even the fashionable touch of two-part, mid-range melodic choruses with a slight emo breeze à la Bullet For My Valentine. Just a pinch, mind you. In Indignation, for example.
“The Incurable Tragedy” is the band’s first concept album. The driving force behind it was the fateful wheel of life turning for guitarist Tim Roth. In 2006 he lived through a real hell on Earth. First, two of his good friends succumbed to cancer, one after the other, in less than two months. As if that weren’t enough, the same cruel disease took Tim’s father too, 10 days before Christmas of that same year. Yeah. There are even worse nightmares than watching the Croatia–Turkey match at Euro 2008. Hm… So, as the album’s title already tells you, we know what this concept story is about. Song titles like The Incurable Tragedy I (September 21, 2006), The Incurable Tragedy II (November 10, 2006) and the closing instrumental The Incurable Tragedy III (December 15, 2006) refer to the pain that hit Tim after losing the people closest to him.
As a whole, the album really works as a fitting gravestone. It strikes a great balance between calm passages wrapped in acoustic cloaks, where the band manages to breathe a proper veil of mourning into the songs and the record as a whole, and, mixed in among them, proper wild attacks of razor-sharp riff-slinging that prove Roth’s outstanding talent for crafting a brilliant guitar riff. And watch out! Don’t forget the touch of the unpredictable that progressive metal can bring you, and that makes Into Eternity so very appealing.
So once you fight your way through to the end, it’s not hard to jump right into another spin of this album. With this record, a thorough step up from “The Scattering Of Ashes” (2006), the band weathered the storm so successfully, especially considering they were forced to bring two brand-new members into the ranks: Justin Bender (guitar) and Steve Bolognese (drums). With “The Incurable Tragedy”, Into Eternity have climbed another rung on the evolutionary ladder and served up an extremely tight album, despite the basic axioms that the progressive metal genre comes with. It’s also a very likable move that the band made an album that runs under 40 minutes. Into Eternity are an interesting bone to gnaw on, and interesting for fans of the more technically demanding forms of metalcore too.
Line-up
Stu Block – vocals
Tim Roth – guitar, backing vocals
Justin Bender – guitar
Troy Bleich – bass, backing vocals
Steve Bolognese – drums
Production
Grant Hall & John Gasparic
Track list
1. Prelude To Woe
2. Tides Of Blood
3. Spent Years Of Regret
4. Symptoms
5. Diagnosis Terminal
6. The Incurable Tragedy I. (September 21, 2006)
7. Indignation
8. Time Immemorial
9. The Incurable Tragedy II. (November 10, 2006)
10. A Black Light Ending
11. One Funeral For Three
12. The Incurable Tragedy III. (December 15, 2006)
Running time: 38.56
