Artist: Into Eternity
Label: Century Media
Release: 2006
Rating: 4/5
Another pretty surprising piece of work is in front of me! So what’s spinning in my CD player this time? The new Into Eternity album! These guys are Canadian progressive metallers who inject elements of extreme metal into their foundation, which actually comes from the classic metal school. If I mention the word “Painkiller” cranked up to five times the speed and aggression, I might get close to Into Eternity, which means the band’s rhythmic chops are a proper, technically polished thrash metal march through the whole album.
The band serves up a range of vocal approaches! Extreme first! The brutal vocals roam from death metal growls to hardcore-style suffering cat screeches, often backed by supersonic blasts. On the other hand, there’s the clean approach, bringing in the outstanding melodicism of “old school speed metal” in the vein of Helstar or early Fates Warning, plus a high, sky-piercing scream that qualitatively matches even what Tim “Ripper” Owens (Beyond Fear, Iced Earth, ex – Judas Priest) himself is capable of. The thing about the melodic vocals is that they’re explosive and powerful in every register, and they don’t let up at any point on the album. The interplay of different vocal approaches tastefully follows the technically demanding, repeated tempo changes in the songs, and it’s a factor that further amplifies the sheer unpredictability of “The Scattering Of Ashes”.
Sadly, Into Eternity are once again one of those kinds of metal bands whose diversity will win over only a small circle of loyal listeners. For the death metal crowd they’re too melodic and “too chirpy”, for melodic purists too extreme. And yet that’s not entirely the case. If we put the album under the microscope, the scales tip pretty quickly in favor of the fans of the classics – that is, melodicity, and the blame for that lies largely with the structure of the songs themselves, which, as already mentioned, draw on the basics of the classic heavy metal school (Judas Priest), which these studio-“bulked-up” youngsters have physically pumped up to the extreme limits. So everything is subjected to extreme supersonic slicing and the instruments are practically competing with each other in a show of power and aggression over who’ll overpower whom. The production is by no means obscure, but the sound carries its weight in the higher registers. The bass line keeps a gorgeous metallic tone, contrastingly emphasized, and its line is clearly voluminous. The complexity of this band might be comparable to that of the legendary Death. But only that and nothing more. Stylistic comparisons are out, as are those about the sound production, and the typical Floridian “thrash riffing”, known as “palm muted shredding”, is completely absent from Into Eternity’s expression.
The overall effect of this metal ”blitzkrieg” is an incredibly listenable, fluid fold-out of ten tracks (not counting the intro), packed into a compact 40 minutes, with no needless stretching. Pay attention to the band’s extreme tightness, to the pauses within the complex transitional passages, which effectively carry the record’s dynamics through a whole palette of the wittiest, white-hot metal rhythms. The double bass pedal is a real little fiery school of “thrash” metal. The feel and atmosphere are comparable more to thrash bands like Annihilator or Seattle’s Nevermore than to any melodic progressive metal band, if we’re going to slap the “progressive metal” label on Into Eternity at all. In terms of mood, Florida’s Zero Hour also come into fleeting consideration to some degree, but Into Eternity by no means bring the kind of toxic pain while you listen that the aforementioned band does, even though Zero Hour don’t use extreme vocals at all. You could say that Into Eternity don’t grow any “gentle” melodic power metal flowers, but they also, interestingly, steer wide of the destructiveness and ruthlessness of hopeless damnation that the elements of extreme metal bring.
This is an album for everyone who loves technical mastery, precision, colorful motifs and complexity, but woven into a tastefully flowing template that races through the secondary association cortex without any trouble. Fans of death and black metal extremes, though, steer clear of Into Eternity and “The Scattering Of Ashes”, because it’ll probably stink to you! Listening to it, in the most ungrateful metaphor, you might even lose your sense of what “brutal” or “extreme” is, which you so reverently always demand. Into Eternity are the epitome of quality, and perhaps it’s enough to note that “The Scattering Of Ashes” is a huge upgrade on all the trademark elements the band offered on its predecessor “Buried In Oblivion” (2004), which, by the way, the German magazine Hard Rock (even though they only write a few lines of record review columns there) sent off two years ago with the words: “…in the field of metal music there probably won’t be a better album this year”. So worth a sin, or at least a try! Oh, and by the way. The album carries a concept, which we won’t pick apart. Basically, death is the beginning of a new birth and fear is the biggest obstacle to learning. The cover itself illustrates the soul and fragments of what was once its physical body – dust. And last but not least, a bit more gloom in the production would fit nicely in the future, dear boys!
Line-up
Tim Roth – guitar, “death” vocals
Stu Block – “clean” vocals
Troy Bleich – bass guitar
Jim Austin – drums
Production
Andy Sneap
Track list
1. Novus Inceptum (1:40)
2. Severe Emotional Distress (3:55)
3. Nothing (3:56)
4. Timeless Winter (3:25)
5. Out (4:55)
6. A Past Beyond Memory (3:38)
7. Surrounded by Night (5:08)
8. Eternal (3:13)
9. Pain Through Breathing (3:52)
10. Suspension of Disbelief (4:28)
11. Paralyzed (3:11)
Album length: 41:21
