SCHOLOMANCE - THE IMMORTALITY MURDER (2CD) - 2002

Scholomance's second album is a rather ambitious effort, a 2-CD concept album. The first disc is similar in style to their debut [CoC #36]: a fusion of the styles of early Dream Theater and later Emperor. The vocals are black metal style raspy screams, and the music is progressive metal played with a melodic black metal aesthetic. Their progmetal roots poke through this black metal facade in a few places, such as keyboard solos and tones and their flair for flashy and flamboyant instrumental sections. In general, the music is layered and complex, and it takes a few listens to really start to get a handle on. Once you do, you'll find that the music is generally quite good and surprisingly memorable. The playing is generally very good, which is remarkable given the technicality of the material. However, there is a big problem with the music, and it's the same one that hampered their debut: the guitar solos. They sound cheap, the playing is sometimes embarrassingly sloppy or inappropriate, and the tone is terrible. It's a very hollow, Strat-like tone, and it's much louder than the other instruments. This might not be so bad if the rest of the music wasn't completely different. The rhythm guitars have a very tight, solid tone, and the music as a whole has a solid, compressed feel. Atop this background, the guitar solos stick out like sore thumbs. The second disc contains instrumental versions of some of the tracks from the first disc and some solo piano interludes. The piano interludes are completely improvised and uncut, which means that they meander about aimlessly, and are occasionally sloppy. Those who don't have a problem with black metal vocals will therefore find little in the second disc to interest them. But it is interesting to hear de-vocalized versions of the songs, and the complexity of the music is such that the songs hold up pretty well as instrumentals. Overall, this is a good offering, but with a little work on the production, could have been even better.

[Aaron McKay: "Penetrating like so many cryptic stares from the uneducated, Scholomance is the epitome of masterful showmanship. Skillful, but incredibly powerful arrangements complicate this double disc set in such a way that your mind thirsts to swallow the ingenuity whole! The intricacies of this woven progressive orchestration are transcended only by the material itself. Disc one's four movements, followed stupendously by four more un-numerated tracks, seek to overpower the listener with all but too much skillful radiance. Words fail to wholly encompass Scholomance, but the second CD remains in a class by itself. If I were forced, and I do mean -forced-, to put a term to this music phenomenon, I'd call Scholomance "progressively complex aristocrat metal". Coming from a true fan crossing the Viking Crown to Epoch of Unlight void, Scholomance more than satisfies!"
http://www.chroniclesofchaos.com

Scholomance were a band that popped up at just the wrong place and time. The late 90s American black metal scene was very sparse, and even then, the style Scholomance chose was entirely different from the dominant form of USBM at the time, the ultra-raw and dark stuff of, say, Judas Iscariot. Scholomance went in the opposite direction; instead of Darkthronian minimalism, Scholomance took the already technical nature of Emperor and added numerous prog tendencies (specifically regarding the bass and keyboards), resulting in two albums of which this is the far more accomplished. This is one of the more obscure albums that The End Records released in its nascent days, and everywhere I look nowadays it's super cheap; if you can't get enough of the mid-period Emperor sound, this is pretty good if very, very dense. If you're one of those losers who only likes In the Nightside Eclipse because you're a basement-dwelling mongoloid who thinks black metal elitism might gain you an actual in the flesh friend or two, you'll hate this.

Folks, this is some seriously technical material here. The prog tendencies should be apparent from the overly long, multi-part song titles as well as the fact that the second disc is entirley instrumental for those who hate vocal extremity, with some added piano/keyboard only songs to flesh it out a bit more. The material here is actually pretty good, it's just that as a whole the album is very overwhelming; I can only take a couple songs at a time before my brain shuts down from trying to process everything. Production is very clear, especially for this type of music which makes everything going on that much more audible.

Instrumentally these guys are fantastic. The bass has that typical prog-bass sound, clear but not very heavy, and it's always good to hear an audible bass, especially one as adventurous as on display here. The drum machine is obvious but not overtly so like so many bands out there today. It is quite clear these guys took time to program the drums and made them just as frantic as everything else. The keyboards are WAY over the top on this one, with all sorts of keyboard shredding left and right; as is the norm in keyboard shredding it's completely ridiculous and self-indulgent, but it's pretty fun for what it is. Guitars actually take somewhat of a backseat to the keyboards, bass and drum machine here, though it still has some interesting moments, such as "The Next Step (For the Sake of the Greater Whole)". And then there's the vocals.

Oh man, the vocals.

The booklet states quite explicitly how there were no vocal effects used in this recording. While I believe that's true, this guy's voice is totally off the wall. Monstrously deep bellows, high pitched shrieks, a more mid-range yet totally clear rasp, even a spoken word segment or two, he's all over the place here. The vocals take some getting used to, which is probably why they included the second disc, but once you get used to the flow he's pretty great. He manages to have such vitriol in his voice it's amazing.

So there you have it. Another obscure album from a band that never really went anywhere that turns out to be pretty solid. If you like Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk but would like to hear it with a clear production instead of the wall of sound, this is probably the closest you'll ever get in terms of technicality and skill.
http://metal-archives.com