Horrendous - Idol

Spewn from the vibrant birthplace of many prominent modern underground hardcore and metal contributors (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Horrendous have been slowly but surely forging their own sharp and nightmarish brand of progressive death metal, with each vile onslaught of music becoming more refined than the last. After reading about their 2015 album, Anareta, on a best-of list at the end of that year, I decided to check out that very album. While I appreciated the musicianship of the album, the snarling, goblin-ish vocal style employed across the record was kind of a deal-breaking turn-off for me. It wasn’t that the vocals were amateurish or boring, it was just something I felt wasn’t fitting of the kind of death metal instrumentation I was hearing. This was at the time of me first hearing them and staring to get into their music, I have come to be a good deal more comfortable and appreciative of the vocal style now, especially with the exponentially increased number of death metal releases I’ve heard making use of the same guttural vocals in the past two years of doing these album discussions. I have come to appreciate the nasty, fork-tongued vocals on Anareta and the band’s previous albums (Ecdysis being another great record) now, but with Idol, the band elevate each aspect of their music a good few measures and they put a quite uniquely sinister spin on the proggy aspects of their sound.

As the Lovecraftian album cover suggests, Idol is a lyrically grand and ghastly affair that speaks horrifically to mindless worship of whatever acts most convincingly like a god, and the weakness of humanity in submission to a manipulative parasite devoid of empathy. These lyrics can be applied widely but probably most naturally to modern politics, especially the lyrics of the semi-titular track, “The Idolator”. But unlike albums like Otep’s and Ministry’s this year, Idol approaches not just easy scapegoats with bumper sticker slogans, but rather the human condition with poetic thoughtfulness. The lyrics on Idol bear a defeated, but eloquent, anguish in enslavement and self-sacrifice to “tear the masters from their gilded gates”. Personally, I really enjoy the type of tangibly abstract neo-mythological poetry the band use on this album, and there is definitely either wisdom and insight to be gleaned from it, or simply descriptive pleasures, if not both.

As for the music, Horrendous have again truly bettered the sound they had improved on Anareta, and channeled it well into eight well-built tracks to showcase this. The form of progressive death metal the band play with keeps its foot close to the genre’s roots in the 90′s, when Chuck Schuldiner was beginning to experiment with Death’s sound. The guitar passages do not stretch out on long tangents of finger-breaking sweep-picking or ever even ride with the bass and drums in tight unison for a maximally thunderous death metal punch, which actually serves the album well. It creates a tone not exactly atmospheric, but contemplative nonetheless. The album is there to spur, not comfortable daydreaming, but unflattering reflection. While I am glad the band have chosen to not saturate their sound with mindless double bass and blast beats, it still feels like the drums too consistently take the back seat while the fretted instrumentalists get to shine. It’s only a minor qualm, but one I think the band could easily address. The album is not really meant to give that same relentless brutality through sheer heaviness or paranoia-inducing confusion through ridiculously fast and technical instrumental performances.

Rather, the album does well to integrate the band’s still-impressive fretwork and chaotic compositional tendencies into an other-worldly aura of demonic mystique that closely mirrors real-world terrors of humanity’s feebleness and blindness. The opening piece, “...Prescience” begins the album with a short dose of eerie bass work, spacious cymbal accents, and haunting synths that reminds me of Obscura’s calmer sections on Diluvium (a similarity the album will eventually play into), leading right into the prophetically apocalyptic “Soothsayer”, which weaves dizzying guitar solos in and out of wild proggy sections of technical death metal bliss, a strong start to the album, but just the beginning.

I mentioned the bleak condition of humanity the lyrics of “The Idolator” portray, and the music matches it thoroughly. The spooky clean guitar intro section (also well-garnished with tasty bass guitar licks) leads seamlessly into a flurry of crunchy riffs, wailing solos, and even some moments of musically technical beauty from the guitarists. My only wish was perhaps for a less sudden ending to the songs, being that it was so meticulously built up. But the next track, “Golgothan Tongues” highlights mankind’s self-destructive contribution to its collective idolatrous vices with similar progressive death metal dexterity. Opening with a grand guitar lead, the song moves through a variety of impressive transitions before finishing with its short, but effective closing section of similarly heavenly guitar work. 

The second side of the album resumes with “Divine Anhedonia”, which finds the band working with spoken word near the song’s climactic moments and ominous clean vocals after a false ending. And of course there is vibrant and shuddering guitar work about on the song, but the band show their consistent ability to use their many ideas to produce an ever-changing dynamic of moods across each section of their songs, which the next track, “Devotion (Blood for Ink)”, continues to display with some slightly thrash-inspired riffing that curiously gives way to Tool-esque clean guitar ambiance and unusually emotive clean vocals.

The short instrumental guitar interlude “Threnody...” segues into the grand closing track “Obolus”, which works in a little bit of black metal influence to enhance its finalizing statement, which of course finds the band upping the bombast of their performance, which does kind of lead to a more homogeneous track, but not so much that it becomes a chore to sit through. The band just do what they can to make sure the epic note they end on is well-orchestrated and not so all-over-the-place. And the song’s closing moments give the strong sense of conclusiveness and brings the album to a cinematic end.

On both the musical and lyrical fronts, Idol is another step up from previous efforts, and one that seems to find the band getting closer to their ideal sound than they are to their prototype sound. Horrendous have once again upped the ante on themselves, with subtle but consistent improvements and signature developments in their sound, and aside from the stylistic developments the full basket of ripe musical ideas they bring to the table allows them to keep the songs from becoming stale at any point in their structure. At this point it’s hard to say what else Horrendous could do to continue this upward trajectory other than the few minor tweaks with the sound like spicing up the drumming or incorporating even more vocal diversity. It’s hard to gauge where the band could go next, but even if they begin to plateau here, it’s not a bad place at all to do so. Though I do think they will find a way to push forward even after this, and I think they have an plenty of progressive death metal ecstasy in them to come. For now, Idol is a fantastic step up for the group, and one worth savoring.