Asphyx
Production: Thick and hollow like the solidity of an old oaken room.
Review: In creating the oldest school of death metal, bands adapted the riff salad approach into simple narrative constructions that interrupted a verse-chorus inertia with discursive passages that return to previous themes, often quoting them in a basic thematic counterpoint, as first seen in Hellhammer's "Triumph of Death." Asphyx create music within this style that is as much doom metal as death metal, with basic riffs grinding into the listener through repetition sandwiched between longer melodic motives, periodically breaking up the meditative atmosphere of muted-strum riffs with sudden rushing tremolo attacks that seem to rise as a whale breaches.
Missing is the emphasis of much American death metal on capping each phrase with a slamming rhythmic conclusion, as well as the percussive offbeat strum to anchor phrases; the music of Asphyx, more like a film soundtrack than rock songs, picks up rigid motion and rides it with percussion cadencing the more free-form phrases into bars. This attack from consistency and not the predictable unpredictable of rock and jazz lends a gravitas to this music which like the weight of the world, bears down onto us and melts our will to resist. Evenly-falling moribund rhythms, like an acceptance of inexorable death after exhaustion on the battlefield, lead into sudden changes of direction that once accepted as axiom, permute through intercessory riffs into a pattern that complements the original and expands upon it by placing it in a new context; some call this style prismatic composition.
Unlike many bands, Asphyx know the wisdom of reusing notes in the course of a phrase, and also use the death metal layering technique that repeats similar melodic figures at different speeds and with different right-hand techniques, as if enwrapping variation within repetition. Despite this outward appearance of simplicity, the way these riffs are stitched together reveals a facile intelligence underneath, like a model-maker creating a diorama to show us what he once saw and how it changed him, standing on a mountain and looking into the toy-sized objects of the village below. This deeply withdrawn and post-human technique allows an epic sound to pervade the music which also sounds offhand, organic and liberated from attachment to biological survival.
At times, the mixed heritage of death metal emerges in a few classic metal and punk figures, but as a general rule, creativity defines these riffs. Vocals are hoarse overdriven barks whipping forward the mixture of percussion and rhythm guitars that, with double bass and flickering of high-hat, sounds like a team of stallions at full gallop crossing a plain after valleys. While the rudimentary and relentless nature of this music makes it enigmatic, its honesty and evocative songwriting guarantee it a place in the legions of metal bands that shaped the underground.
Production: Bass-oriented resounding solidity.
Review: On their self-titled album, Asphyx push old school death metal -- doomy heavy metal mixed with raw hardcore riffing -- into thunderous music of charging chord progressions that possessed of an ambience that silhouettes melody in expectation, demonstrate a savage alacrity for the earthquake motion of cavernously resonant returns to elemental patterns of interval. The resulting booming death metal, with the riding rhythms and emphatic resolutions of epic battle music, expounds upon the recombination of fragmentary motifs in death metal riffs that defines the primal art of structure through its sense of shifting perspective by altering the significance of background topography.
Echoing its own structures, downturning riff avalanches rumble into their own entropy and dissipate as melodic riffs emerge to complement their direction with an ascendent greater context, producing a sense of clarity from decay and transcendence of destruction. Drums roll and flicker under bass doubling the surging, undulating riffs periodically cleated by seizure of rhythm in a full stop; then, inexorable like the flow of rivers or erosion of mountains, the pattern repeats until tension exhausts us, at which point an immanent melody slips out and dances over it before the flow resumes. Riffs leap between tempos and reappear, guided by emotionally impassive vocals that announce a structural rather than colorful doom.
Although Asphyx is basic, repetitive music, it is shaped from the aesthetic symbolism of phrase and rhythm, and so tells a story in the juxtaposition of seemingly radically different forms that, in the contrast of afterimage, briskly make sense and expand upon the previous meaning like a story in which each action leads to involvement in a larger plot through the architecture of its change. In the classic death metal style, much of the power of this music is the texture: reverberating double bass, guttural vocals emphasizing the cadence of each phrase unraveling as it pulses with the energy of interchange in confrontation. Funeral drone riffs define space for more evocative elements of theme, tuning mood to a sense of endurance, exhaustion and loss.
1. God Cries (3:56)
2. It Awaits (3:22)
3. My Beloved Enemy (5:19)
4. Did Yesterday (3:46)
5. Cut-Throat Urges (2:12)
6. Slaughtered In Sodom (2:50)
7. Frozen Soul (4:25)
8. Fear My Greed (2:44)
9. The Blood I Spilled (2:55)
Length: 31:29