Artist: Success Will Write Apocalypse Across The Sky
Title: The Grand Partition And The Abrogation Of Idolatry
Type: Album
Label: Nuclear Blast
Well, it's a comprehensive band and album title, if not concise, eh? To be fair though, the band name does give a really tight description of their sound. Coming from Tampa, Florida, this outfit is to brutality what Pol Pot was to being a “bit unpleasant”. The album cover, with the hooded, skull-necklace wearing weirdos stood on burning earth, kind of sets the tone for this platter – you're not going to find any hymns to vegan communal living, stories of happy days spent at a picnic spot or joyous tales of human endeavours. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a blasting death metal album in the modern vein.
SWWAATS (as I will henceforth be obliged to call them due to concerns on brevity and the use of my word-count on just typing their bloody name) have taken the decidedly modern route to death metal. This means, of course, a certain amount of smart-arse attitude (song titles like, “The Realization that Mankind is Viral in it's nature” and “Of Worms, Jesus Christ and Jackson County Missouri” anyone?), extremely technical musicianship, a drummer that must have been forged in Skynets semi-human resources department, and a pace that verges from “fucking-hell-that's-fast” to “slightly quicker-than-the-human-ear-can-follow”. Is it heavy? Yes, this is heavier than playing the entire Morbid Angel catalogue backwards at triple speeds. In simple terms, this is really the death metal equivalent of having your head smashed in by some nutter dressed only in ski socks and wielding a massive sledgehammer.
Yet, for all the (often) dizzying song structures and inhuman warp-speed deathliness of it all, SWWAATS get most interesting when they slow down on the pace and concentrate on making things a little more interesting. The relative simplicity of “Automated Oration and the Abolition of Silence”, with it's demi-grindcore heart and catchy verse serves to highlight the utter violence of the latter sections of heaving, lapping waves of riffs through simple dynamics rather more than the more serpentine song structures. Of course, fans of this hyper technical brutality will lap up the more incomprehensibly violent sections, but for an old fashioned bastard like me, this is one of those frustrating albums where the music is good in segments rather than in songs. The review CD proclaims “this is not the final master!”, though to be honest it'd be hard to see how they could improve on the sound, which does a sterling job of keeping everything that's going on audible. Special mention indeed to the drumming, which is the most impressive that I've heard in months, and some of the guitar work in the slower, more atmospheric sections is also pretty tasty. Certainly, SWWAATS are a talented bunch, but in the grand scheme of things, TGPATAOI (the album title abbreviated rather than a brand of Greek yoghurt or some Cthulhoid cult) will I am sure be seen as an evolutionary step rather than the zenith of their work.
http://www.myspace.com/swwaats
Chris Davison
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