The Physics Of Fire

Two years have passed since a hurricane of technically polished progressive death metal from Atlanta swept across the metal scene. Two years since our first introduction to the quartet Becoming The Archetype, who with their debut Terminate Damnation already made it clear that once you’ve heard their uncompromising sound, it’s hard to stay indifferent. And barely two years later, after a grueling promo tour, they’re back with a fresh record that doesn’t trail that inspiring debut by an inch. Ladies and gentlemen: it’s time to get schooled in the physics of fire – The Physics Of Fire.

A classically tinged intro with harpsichord and gentle guitar picking spends a good minute on a grandiose teasing of the senses, then the song ‘Epoch Of War’ gets ripped open by a brutal eruption of raw death core attitude. The melodically polished contours blend nicely with Jason’s furrowed vocals, Seth’s flawless solos seal the deal like a brilliant-cut diamond, and you absolutely can’t overlook Brent’s precise rhythmic work on the drums or Alex filling any still-empty gaps with melodic singing and guitar harmonies. This is Becoming The Archetype in their brightest light. The fire is unleashed. ‘Immolation’, with its near-black-metal symphonic touches of the kind we’re usually used to from the likes of Dimmu Borgir, strings a black diamond onto the previously bright contours. In the second half the song, relieved of concrete-heavy distortion, drifts close to Dream Theater-style motifs of softer vocals and epic guitar solos, but the quartet of metal wizards doesn’t reach for stereotypes, so the clean fields of interpretation are pretty narrow and fractured, yet they lead you confidently through the labyrinths of the psyche. They spin Ariadne’s thread all the way to the place of your own personal destruction. ‘Autopsy’ cuts with the surgical precision of a scalpel straight to the cerebellum, and once again, almost unexpectedly, the brutal tempo gets softened by a duel between Jason Wisdom’s granite-hard and Alex Kenis’s down-soft vocals, plus the pampering inventiveness of Seth Hecox’s and Alex’s fast-fingered excursions along the whole length of the guitar neck. These guys know how to rein in the wild tempo of total destruction. ‘The Great Fall’ is the last stop of the album’s first third where you can feel humanity, something alive. The instrumental ‘Nocturne’ gives off a feeling of death and the rebirth of something more epic. As if flames shot out of the phoenix’s tail and destroyed the old world of the grotesque and the void. The hatching and growing of the world’s new outlines can only be conveyed without words. Form and content are completed here in a structural perfection of black, night, and white, light, brightness. Sticky, thick guitars weave the intro of ‘Monolith’, undoubtedly one of the album’s more special moments, which exceeds expectations in the way we’re used to from Swedish heavyweights Opeth. The archetypization of creation keeps building. The organ sound heightens the feeling of approaching something almost divine. Gods build and destroy. ‘Construct And Collapse’ plays with rhythm and melody in a progressive way, but doesn’t lose an inch of the ferocity and the relentlessness of the steel embrace of total nihilization. The path of this particular revelation is only for the hardiest. Only they will grasp what the essence of fire is. ‘Endure’. A little under three minutes of vignettes of destruction and the grotesque. They wear you out a bit, setting you up for classic death metal divinity that sounds like Chuck Schuldiner wrote it, only instead of cerebrospinal fluid they pour pure kerosene into the spinal canal – ‘Fire Made Flesh’. Alex’s mellifluous clean vocals are almost superfluous this time. Unnecessary. The closing distorted guitars are magically complemented by a Spanish guitar motif. And the gentle acoustics are just an interlude of total destruction, which with its wild tempo opens the door to dying all over again – ‘Second Death’. True to its name, the musical motifs are much more epically drawn-out and syrupy. Only at the start, though, because it’s really worth listening to the song even after a few bars of introductory pathos. Don’t worry about getting some serious case of diabetes, because what they serve up is a very hard-to-digest and not at all sugary package of technical death metal. It would’ve held up without the pretty vocal lines too, which sound like the guys were looking for filler in the back half of the record and wanted to stretch the story out a bit longer. In six minutes you get an overdose of otherworldly wandering above the clouds, the crushing realization that you were wrong about everything you thought you knew, and then some. ‘The Balance Of Eternity’ repeats a slightly softened version of the epic melodics we’ve already heard, and the guys steer the record to a grand finale where the piano sound dominates again at moments. The world has to be burned to the ground. After the last salvos of destructive screams that shatter the calm, and after a rather drawn-out sonic wall of ballast made of themes and meat-cleaver guitars, the passions settle and the record fades out into silence and darkness.

After the first listen, the record might seem like a pretty tough bite for fast-food digestion. But that’s exactly why Becoming The Archetype are undoubtedly a band that promises far more than most of their contemporaries, who swear by an instant mix of stomach-friendly melodies and predictable moments of choreographed fury. Becoming The Archetype are much more than just one in a line of cliché clones of what we’ve already heard. They test the untested. They broaden the horizons of their expression to serve you an even bigger selection of authentic primal images, archetypes. This time they’ve served up their vision of fire. Elemental. Nothing overly avant-garde, but told entirely their own way. Schizophrenic and fragmented. A mosaic of countless shades unfolds before you, more than you can register all at once. Verdict: a conditionally excellent record that may only start giving you pleasure after the second or third listen.