Since their formation all the way back in 2003, Through the Eyes of the Dead has formed a substantially successful career for themselves in the shape of three studio albums, a split with melodic death metal band The Knife Trade, an initial EP released in 2004, and tours with giants such as Suffocation, The Faceless, Fleshgod Apocalypse and more. October 2017 marks the release of their new album ‘Disomus’, which is scheduled to be released via eOneMusic and is their fourth full-length record overall.
Album opener “Hate the Living” has already been available for listening since August and immediately strikes with blasts of incredibly guttural low-end vocals and a filthily heavy guitar tone. With some deathcore bands in the current heavy music climate choosing to filter and water down their sound and some others deciding to abandon the genre altogether in conquest of other genre-based musical ambitions, the fact that Through the Eyes of the Dead have decided to stick to their guns in such a brutally honest way is respectable if nothing else.
“Obitual” and “Haruspex” follow as the record’s second and third tracks, respectively. The vocal range of frontman Danny Rodriguezon these songs is particularly and especially impressive mainly due to his ability to perfectly balance the correct mix of higher-pitched screaming and disgustingly nasty growls, and also simply holding the notes for longer so that they have more effectiveness in conjunction with the rest of what is going on in the song. While his vocal style is similar to that of Whitechapel’s Phil Bozeman, it doesn’t feel nor sound so identical that Rodriguez loses his unique personality as a frontman and particularly as a vocalist.
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“Of Mortals We Once Were” brutalizes the tone of Rodriguez’s vocals even more so, both in terms of how high and how low he manages to stretch his voice in terms of dexterity. The instrumentation, courtesy of guitarists Steven Funderburk and Justin Longshore, bassist Jake Ososkie, and drummer Michael Ranne, appropriately follows suit with some of the fastest playing on the respective instruments heard this far on the record. The half-way point on ‘Disomus’ is marked by the tracks “The Binding Nightmare Hex” and “Vortices in the Stygian Maelstrom”, with these songs managing to explore new avenues and so far undiscovered territory in terms of this album with the melodic guitar passages of the former song, and the start and stop mechanics plus varying tempos and time signatures that the latter song balances itself on from its opening moments all the way to its closing touches.
The instrumental “Ignis”, at one minute and forty seconds in its total length, employs the usage of acoustic guitars and strings – evidently and obviously not traditional musical instruments when it comes to the composition of this style of music – into its own while making the track’s placing within the overall body of work seem incredibly appropriate as a breather for what has already came and what is set to come as the record approaches its final set of songs.
Blast beats and savagely white-hot bursts of guitar kick off “Teras”, which possesses some of the catchiest and most interesting vocal lines to be found on the whole of ‘Disomus’. Some songs take you a few listens in order for you to get your mind wrapped around them, whereas this grips and does not let you go right from the start. With guitar squeals that sound like they belong on Gojira’s 2016 anthem “Stranded”, “Teras” is without a shadow of a doubt one of the album’s strongest compositions.
Two more songs to go before the album draws itself to a close: “Till Solace, She’ll Haunt”, and “Dismal”. Both songs definitely succeed in fulfilling the standard of quality that has come to present itself over the course of the entire ‘Disomus’ record, but having to follow what I consider is the best song on the whole album in “Teras” is a tough ask, and unfortunately neither “Till Solace, She’ll Haunt” nor “Dismal” manages to accomplish this.
Through the strength of their discography, Through the Eyes of the Dead have established themselves as one of deathcore’s more admittedly undervalued artists, gaining significant recognition only by the genre’s dedicated supporters as opposed to the style’s casual listeners. This new album, ‘Disomus’, should set to change that somewhat with a collection of songs designed to draw people into not just them as a band but the genre in general. If you’re searching for something worth your time in terms of 2017 deathcore releases, definitely check out this new album by Through the Eyes of the Dead.