Below
Upon A Pale Horse
(Metal Blade Records)
Anymore, I have grown dubious of anything self-described as epic. There’s a dorm room party element to the term, reeking of someone desperate to oversell cups full of keg leftovers without a more compelling or honest grasp of vocabulary.
Upon A Pale Horse (as in, “Death arrives on…”) is the eight-track sophomore effort from the band Below out of Nykoping Sweden. The five-piece’s first album Across A Dark River dropped three years ago and earned them instant credibility on the European metal festival circuit. Now their latest shows just how far the band has progressed in that short amount time. This collection of songs comes across as far more ambitious and encompassing a broader range of forms, one described by the band in the press as epic.
The band offers up a solid brand of traditional heavy metal on tracks like “Disappearing Into Nothing” and “Suffer Into Silence” and “The Coven”. Each one has a straightforward feeling, drawn from dark subject and at roughly five minutes and change, exhibit efficient songwriting. The guitar work by Paud and Berg is admirable, their solos soaring and the band gels well, revealing an overall technical precision. I am not terribly crazy about the vocals on Below’s more direct songs, their most defining characteristic the strain to be understood rather than inhabit a mood all of their own.
But Upon A Pale Horse is a more ambitious record than its predecessor was, and a few of the darker later tracks chalk up marks to that impression. The dank seven-minutes of doom metal on “Hour Of Darkness” is built upon delightfully sour chords and moods without once coming across as cloying; the slowed down title dirge is a behemoth, bringing forth one of the albums’ rare thunderous percussion core. Even if the chanting background vocals and on-going need to capture each bloody syllable drags the tracks down a notch, these are some pretty darn good songs and make me really optimistic for what their next album might yield. The grimy gem on Upon A Pale Horse might be “1000 Broken Bones” drawing on classic heavy metal influences (my first thought was a band like Dio) and could serve as a crossover track able to unify them all.
The album ends on “We Are All Slaves” a track showing how tentative promise can be. On the nose lyrics, pleas about society, pointing a finger at the tyranny of cold modernity are all tricks that have long since done much more than fill space. If anything, Upon A Pale Horse should convince you that this is a band whose abilities and craft should aspire to far more than space filler.
This might be epic, but it is so close to another, better word that it’s almost painful.
