‘From Hell I Rise’ is a fairly unique solo debut situation for an established metal guitarist in that it is basically an extension of Kerry King’s old band, rather than a vehicle for something he couldn’t express with his main band. Now that Slayer isn’t recording anymore, everybody expected King’s solo debut ‘From Hell I Rise’ to sound like Slayer. And it does, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a bit astounded as to where all this quality material was in the last two or so decades of Slayer’s career. ‘From Hell I Rise’ is a surprisingly solid slab of aggressive thrash metal.
Since the better Slayer songs, in my opinion, were generally written or co-written by Jeff Hanneman, I’m actually kind of surprised how much I enjoy ‘From Hell I Rise’. Because on the surface, the album does sound a lot like King’s old band. There is an abundance of fairly chord-heavy thrash metal riffs that hardly ever go too far up the neck, Death Angel’s Mark Osegueda even sings like a young Tom Araya on some tracks, and the lyrics have all the edginess of a teenager that doesn’t really have anything to rebel against. So far, not much new, one would say.
However, it took hearing ‘From Hell I Rise’ for me to realize how much of Slayer’s sound was in the details. The fact that the album’s rhythm guitar sound has a crisp bite rather than the weird, muddy sound some of Slayer’s recent albums had does wonders for the overall viciousness of the faster tracks. Phil Demmel is likely the best lead guitarist King has ever recorded with and the fact that his solos make sense melodically contrasts with King’s noisy, chaotic leads wonderfully. Osegueda yelling, shouting and screaming like a man half his age – and possessed – elevates the songs to a higher level, and hearing Paul Bostaph play the drums is always a pleasure.
The uptempo material is where ‘From Hell I Rise’ is at its best. ‘Crucifixation’ is probably my favorite of the bunch because of the unbridled pulsation that the higher chords create, but also because its grinding middle section is probably the best slower part on the album. ‘Everything I Hate About You’ is the shortest original song King ever tracked and it’s an annihilating full-speed monster. Opening track ‘Where I Reign’, the self-explanatory ‘Rage’ and particularly the closing title track are all vicious pieces of uptempo thrash that should please any fan of the genre. First single ‘Idle Hands’ is slightly less intense tempo-wise, but every bit as enjoyable.
King still isn’t an expert at writing slower tracks – only the short, ominous ‘Tension’ is a truly great example of that style here – and ‘Two Fists’ is pretty much a punk song that fails to captivate me. But apart from that, ‘From Hell I Rise’ is significantly better than I expected it to be. It would have been easy to slap something together with a minimum of effort and let the names of the people involved do all the heavy lifting promotionally. Instead, King released the best set of songs he has been a part of since Slayer’s 2006 release ‘Christ Illusion’.
Recommended tracks: ‘Crucifixation’, ‘From Hell I Rise’, ‘Idle Hands’, ‘Rage’
Depth in songwriting, strong conceptual lyrics, excellent musicianship and a spectacular lead singer: Unleash the Archers has quite a lot going for them. Their brand new album ‘Phantoma’ sees the Canadian quintet taking the next step in the evolution of contemporary power metal. Singer Brittney Hayes is more than happy to share a few glimpses behind the scenes of the creation of ‘Phantoma’.
The conceptual nature of Unleash the Archers’ albums calls for a very specific songwriting approach. “We kind of experimented with this songwriting process with ‘Apex’, and it worked out really well”, says Hayes. “Andrew (Kingsley, guitarist) and I were moving in exactly the same direction the whole time. So we did it again for a bit, but Grant (Truesdell, guitarist and harsh vocalist) and Nick (Miller, bassist) have contributed to this one as well.
What I would do is write out a track-by-track beforehand that explains each of the tracks as if they were chapters in the story. So it’s what’s going on in the story, how I want the song to feel, how I want it to make the listener feel, any kind of sonic notes – so: this should be super fast and heavy, this one needs to be more doomy or industrial – and then I’ll give examples: this Amon Amarth riff is kind of what I’m thinking. And then I’ll send that to the boys, they write their riffs and come back to me and I can say: I’m thinking this riff would be this song. Or: that riff just doesn’t feel right, so let’s put it away and save it for another album.
Once we kind of have the basics, we look what works where and maybe tweak a little bit here and there. Or I will say: in this song, she’s talking about this happening, so maybe we kind of incorporate that feeling into it, what kind of riffs will be able to explain that kind of emotional transition? It’s very collaborative. And I’m constantly working with the boys on how I want the riffs to reflect what’s going on in the story or how I want the song to move with the emotion.”
A More Cohesive Sound
The songwriting process accounts for the music on Unleash the Archers’ concept albums to reflect the story arc that Hayes creates. “It’s important to me that both speak to the same motivation”, she nods. “Because we’ve done concept records in the past. We did ‘Demons of the AstroWaste’, for example, and that was really just fly by the seat of our pants kind of stuff. No organization whatsoever. So that album is kind of all over the place.
‘Time Stands Still’ was kind of a concept theme. Every song was written from the point of view of an independent band in Canada trying to make their way. That album contained songs from Andrew, Grant, and some old songs from Brayden (Dyczkowski, former guitarist) were included in there as well. Just like a bit of a mish-mash.
So I really wanted to find a way to make it so that it was a more cohesive sound, like the whole record was constantly driving towards getting the story across. That was kind of how we figured out to do it. And it’s been working really well so far. It really helps us all stay on the same page.”
Firing Off Entire Songs
Although the songwriting method gives the band a framework to work from, it still leaves room for changes. “There were definitely some songs that weren’t at all what I was thinking they were going to be”, Hayes admits. “I’d look back at my notes, the overview that I originally sent, and I’d think: this was supposed to be an industrial-inspired song? It did not turn out like that at all, haha!
At one point, Andrew was just firing off entire songs. Every day, he’d send something and say: here’s a new one, I did this one last night. Nick and Grant just couldn’t keep up. Andrew just gets into this place where the riffs just don’t stop coming. I don’t know how he does it. He must have sent three or four demos that were all like: this is ‘Ghosts’ or ‘Seeking’ or ‘Gods in Decay’ or ‘Blood Empress’. It could be anyone of these, whichever you like.
He sent in some things where I thought: this isn’t really what I was thinking, but I could make it work for this song. I could change the vibe of it a little bit and have it be less of a dark moment and maybe more of a moment of revelation. Some of it was just too good, but I didn’t know where to use it. Then I would change things a little bit in order to fit it in.
This was Nick’s first time contributing. And he was sending songs where I was like: no, not quite, but could you maybe take this and this? Then he comes back to me and said: hm, maybe I should read the overview. Yes! Haha! That’s why it’s there! I don’t think he realized just how picky I am. And then he came back with ‘The Collective’. Nailed it.”
On the Same Page
In Miller’s defense, he may have needed some time to adapt to the band he was just about to record his first album with. “Grant, Andrew, Scott (Buchanan, drummer) and I had been jamming as a band since 2013”, Hayes explains. “But we had been friends on tour since the beginning, since 2009, or whenever our first tour together was. They were in Archon Legion, Scott and I were in Unleash. So we were always on the same page even before Grant and Andrew joined.
It was kind of like a culture of: we’re here to have fun and we want to tour as much as we can. It’s about having a good time, not about being perfect or reaming someone out because they screwed up a riff on stage. It’s about being kind to one another. This is a vacation; stop taking it so seriously. We were trying to find someone like that.
And that is why we chose Nick. Or why he chose us. We kind of chose each other. When he started touring with us in 2018, he just fit. You see him smile on photos of us playing live: that’s him. Super positive. All the time.”
Just Let It Happen
Calling their tours vacations might be selling the band’s well-received live performances short, however. “We do prepare quite substantially”, Hayes emphasizes. “You want to be physically prepared. Especially myself; I have to start warming up and getting ready about four to six weeks before we hit the road. Because I can’t do what I do for weeks if I’m not ready.
But once you hit the road, you just let it happen. We do take it seriously, because we want to do the best show we possibly can for every fan, and give them the live experience they came and paid for. But also, we’re never going to sacrifice having a good time for playing perfectly.
No one cared about us for a really long time. But that just reminds you every day of why you’re here, right? You can’t be in the game for fame or money. That’s for sure. We just constantly looked at tours as a vacation: this is the time we get to be these rock stars and pretend that people care about us.
It just happens that traditional heavy metal and power metal are becoming cool genres again. Now we’re getting a little more attention. And five, ten years from now, we’ll just be touring small venues in obscurity again, and that’s fine. We’re just doing it because we love it, and we have a core group of fans that supports us. And that’s great!”
Eighties and Nineties Science Fiction to the Max
An interesting development on ‘Phantoma’ compared to its predecessors is that Unleash the Archers appears to give their arrangements some more room to breathe. Something Hayes especially profits from as a singer. “It’s funny, because I’m always saying: can you just do chords here? Can I be the one who writes the melody?”, she smiles. “We need the fans leaving the venue singing something. Otherwise, they’ll go home saying: what was that song?
I’m all about the classic choruses. This time, we did have more of an eighties influence. Because that’s totally what we were at. This is eighties and nineties science fiction to the max. That’s what was kind of driving us. So that is what we wanted the underlying influence to be, but with a modern spin on it. We weren’t influenced by bands from the eighties; we were influenced by bands that are doing the eighties stuff right now. Stuff like Striker. Or Nestor. They were an eighties band that made a sweet comeback. Loving their stuff right now.
A lot of that is leaving room for the vocals to kind of do the work and the storytelling. I mean, the boys definitely had their riffage going on. ‘Seeking Vengeance’ is just that the whole time. ‘The Collective’ as well; very guitar-heavy. But they peel away a little bit sometimes and leave some room for me.”
Blending In vs. Floating on Top
Hayes’ incredible vocal range might also make it easier to adapt her vocals to the songwriting. “I did want to use a lot of my lower range on this one”, she says. “Because I hadn’t really done that on the past records. For a lot of the tracks, I wanted it to be a little bit of a lower, richer, darker sound. Getting to do that was a lot of fun. I tried my super low register a little bit on our ‘Northwest Passage’ cover song. But then of course, you’ve got to do the high stuff too. I just felt like we’ve done that already. It’s just more fun to experiment with seeing what you can do.”
There is a precedent for Hayes’ lower register, as she used to be an alto in choirs. “I think I’m technically a mezzo-soprano, but they just put me in alto, because I could sing low”, she explains. “There’s never enough alto. I’m fine with that though, because we get all the good harmonies. Sopranos are over there doing the melodies, so let’s do all the cool stuff around and over the top and underneath it. Very different world, the choral world. You’re constantly trying to blend in as opposed to thinking: how do I float on top of everything?”
Switching to a B standard tuning has also been helpful for Hayes: “We used to be playing in drop D, which was good for me for lower stuff. But the second I wanted to get higher, it was either up in my head voice or not going there at all. So when we changed our tunings for ‘Abyss’ and ‘Phantoma’, it actually made it easier to play around with what I was doing originally. So the high wails are not super hard, but they sound hard.”
Because Hayes still does not like using her head voice too often. “Not really, no”, she confirms. “I prefer to do kind of like a mid-ranged falsetto kind of thing, where I just put it to the soft palate, as opposed to right into the head voice. The Geoff Tate thing. I stole it, haha!”
In the Middle of a Struggle
Given the amount of effort Hayes has put in the story of ‘Phantoma’, she admits it isn’t easy to pull the songs apart for the upcoming live sets. “Oh, it’s incredibly difficult”, she says. “I’m constantly thinking: is this going to make sense without the tracks around it? Or is the song even going to be one that people want to hear? So yeah, it’s super hard, and we’re in the middle of that struggle right now, because we are getting ready for our album release show at the end of the month.
We played Legions of Metal in Chicago recently. Chicago never got to see the ‘Abyss’ set, so we decided: let’s do the ‘Abyss’ set for them. And now we are going on to the ‘Phantoma’ set. Picking singles was already hard, because you don’t want to be giving away the story. That’s always such a difficult part of the process.
But we’re also not the kind of band that just plays the whole new record from beginning to end. No one wants to hear that! Everyone wants to come and see their band play their favorite songs, right? It’s tough, and we’re still not done with it, so feel free everyone to put the songs that you want to hear us play in the comments.”
After two decades of injecting various degrees of death metal and gothic metal into their sound, My Dying Bride has pretty much been a doom metal band on their last couple of albums. Sure, the atmosphere on ‘A Mortal Binding’ can still be somewhat gothic in nature – though nowhere near as unrelentingly bleak as its predecessor ‘The Ghost of Orion’ got at times – but the slow, mournful guitar riffs have been the focal point of My Dying Bride’s recent albums. Which is a good thing, because that is clearly their biggest strength and does not deserve to be buried under layers of atmospherics.
Overall, ‘A Mortal Binding’ sounds a bit more straightforward than ‘The Ghost of Orion’. Those who were thrown off by the avant-garde touches of the latter will certainly have an easier time getting into this one. Personally, I thought ‘The Ghost of Orion’ was one of My Dying Bride’s best albums to date – possibly the best – and ‘A Mortal Binding’ does not quite live up to it, but some of the better elements fortunately have stayed. Guitarists Andrew Craighan and Neil Blanchett being front and center both compositionally and sonically is one, the fact that Aaron Stainthorpe sings better than he ever has is another.
Still, ‘A Mortal Binding’ and I originally got off on the wrong foot. There is one simple reason for that: I really, really don’t like opening track ‘Her Dominion’. It is the worst track of the album by a significant margin and therefore, an odd choice to open the album with. The riffs, while decent enough on their own, don’t seem to connect up all that well and Stainthorpe’s growls in the minimalistic verses sound forced and tired. That last thing is surprising, because his growls sounds commanding and borderline scary in the excellent doom monster ‘The Apocalyptist’ later on.
Fortunately, the album gets better after its somewhat awkward opening minutes. ‘The 2nd of Three Bells’ , ‘A Starving Heart’ and closing track ‘Crushed Embers’ are excellent examples of the mournful doom metal My Dying Bride is known for, with the extremely slow riffs and dramatic guitar harmonies that were the band’s trademark early on. In fact, a few of these songs could have been on ‘Turn Loose the Swans’ if Mark Mynett’s mixing job did not make them so obviously contemporary. An additional benefit of that is that listeners can actually hear how complemenetary Lena Abé’s excellent bass playing is. The denser ‘Unthroned Creed’ brings ‘A Line of Deathless Kings’ to mind.
The worst thing I could say about ‘A Mortal Binding’ is that it is another My Dying Bride album. However, the niche they have carved for themselves in recent years is – in my opinion, at least – the best representation of what My Dying Bride can be. The guitars don’t need elaborate keyboard arrangements to emphasize the dark, romantic qualities of the music – again, Shaun MacGowan provides texture first and foremost. ‘A Mortal Binding’ doesn’t quite blow me away like ‘The Ghost of Orion’ did, but its best moments are some of the greatest doom metal around these days.
Recommended tracks: ‘The Apocalyptist’, ‘Crushed Embers’, ‘The 2nd of Three Bells’
There was a time when I used to say that Brittney Hayes deserved a better band than Unleash the Archers. At the time, I just didn’t expect that she would not have to change bands for that. ‘Apex’ (2017) and ‘Abyss’ (2020) were not so much developments as complete evolutions of their sound, and ‘Phantoma’ takes this growth even further. In fact, in terms of songwriting, ‘Phantoma’ is one of the best modern power metal albums I have heard in a long time, and it gives me a bit of hope for the future of the genre.
While the previous two Unleash the Archers albums were highly enjoyable, there were also moments that tried to be too much at the same time. Although ‘Phantoma’ is stylistically similar, the songs are given much more room to breathe, something which Hayes’ spectactular voice especially profits from. Also, the band better succeeds at combining their influences into a more cohesive whole this time around. The synthwave and eighties pop influences are part of the contemporary North American power metal songs rather than being assigned their own respective tracks. All of this makes ‘Phantoma’ an incredibly rewarding and at times surprising listening experience.
The better use of space was already evidenced by the first few singles off ‘Phantoma’. ‘Ghosts in the Mist’ especially impressed me in how nobody in the band gets in each other’s way, and the vocal melodies are simply excellent. First single ‘Green & Glass’ even has the band layering a multitude of guitars, Hayes’ powerful cleans and guitarist Grant Truesdell’s cappuccino machine growls without sounding like anyone is trying to push anyone else off the album. Excellent, but all too rare examples of how power metal can mature without taking the uptempo energy out of the equation.
Variation is another asset of ‘Phantoma’. The band goes through different tempos and levels of intensity to create an excellent flow. ‘Give It Up or Give It All’ is the biggest departure, its brightly shimmering clean guitars and subtle changes bringing the prog-pop of early Steve Hogarth-era Marillion to mind, but still sounding like Unleash the Archers. Uptempo power metal tracks like the galloping ‘Buried in Code’, the dynamic ‘Seeking Vengeance’, the soaring ‘The Collective’ and the somewhat proggy ‘Ph4nt0-mA’ are offset perfectly by melodic mid-tempo rockers like the gorgeous ‘Gods in Decay’, the slow-building opener ‘Human Era’ and dramatic closer ‘Blood Empress’.
I gladly stand corrected. With the songwriting upgrades Unleash the Archers has had over the past few years, they simply are the better better band that Brittney Hayes deserves. That was already the case on the previous two albums, but ‘Phantoma’ is truly an improvement even over both of them. Being a fan of the album format, I also love how the band has created a listening experience that ebbs and flows so pleasantly that it stays interesting throughout its 55-ish minutes of playing time. If you want to hear a band finally moving power metal forward without forcing it or trying to sound clever, look no further.
Recommended tracks: ‘Ghosts in the Mist’, ‘The Collective’, ‘Ph4nt0-mA’, ‘Gods in Decay’
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