Lord Dying
Summon The Faithless
Relapse
Street: 06.28
Lord Dying = High On Fire + Fucked Up
Lord Dying, a Portland quartet featuring former stalwarts of the SLC metal scene, remind us why we first fell for metal. This album features startling clarity for their debut recording. This does no discredit to the musicianship, which is highly adept—rather, the immediacy of both vocals and instruments present Lord Dying as a connoisseur’s band—metal focused on quality of sound, not just gain and volume. Yes, the album recalls the expected influences, but more impressive—indeed worthy of delectation—is the grain of the band’s total voice, which includes actually intelligible lyrics. Their songs leave breathing room for the burn of vacuum tubes and the scrape of human tissue. Lord Dying retrieve everything jettisoned with the advent of overproduced, gagging, and silly, black and ambient metal. If metal can be organic, Lord Dying is precisely that. Indeed, the band’s correlative fascination with death and putrefaction makes actual sense—nothing can rot which was not first alive. –Bryan Kubarycz