One of the fun things about metal bands is how easy it is to misjudge a group based on aesthetics and membership. When I saw the announcement that Canada’s Amphisbaena was putting out their debut, I fell into that trap. That ‘black/death’ genre tag. Members shared with the likes of Revenge, Weapon, and (more tellingly) Antediluvian. That cover art courtesy of Abomination Hammer featuring a transcending, decaying body with no clear features, but definitely endowed. Everything about Rift was screaming ‘another war metal album’, but the I, Voidhanger signing is no mistake: Amphisbaena is up to something much more mystical and intriguing.
Standing in stark contrast to my expectations, Rift is an album that takes the blackened death metal template in a very atmospheric, almost ritualistic direction. Unlike many other bands in the style, Amphisbaena doesn’t lean hard on blasting fury beyond a couple particular moments, preferring to operate somewhere between midtempo and borderline doom. The riff work tends more towards paced, bendy and dissonant chords over tremolos, and the solos that emerge surprisingly regularly are far more melodic and emotive than the blistering shredding one may expect. Moreover, a substantial amount of the album (roughly three full tracks) barely features metal at all, being somewhere between post-rock and full-on ambience. It makes for a delightfully diverse, and oddly brief, trip into the void.
Hell, Amphisbaena even gets proggy with their approach, best signposted by opening Rift with a suite taking up about half the album runtime. Opening on sparse guitars, the “Rift” triune runs an emotional gamut from hazy languid chords to sheer blasting fury, bisected by the moody synths and clean guitars of “Rift II – Opening of the Eye”. To wit, “Rift I – Wading the Deserts of Earth” is a slow build of tension and harrowing vocals peaking at a charge before dropping into the atmospherics of the second track. Meanwhile, “Rift III – Ruinous Godlike Simulacra” blasts out of the gate with the most intense passage of the whole album, before a duel of static and feedback heralds a more languid closing section featuring sublime guitar solos. To call it a great opener feels underhanded given how much of the album it takes up, but the “Rift” cycle is a tremendous exercise in atmosphere and dynamics that passes by oddly fast and makes for one of the better bodies of metal I’ve heard all year.
To Amphisbaena‘s great credit, the remaining half of Rift doesn’t feel like any sort of a throwaway even following that epic. “Scaled Ekpyrotic Splinters” and “Exponentially Falling… Upward” bear the bulk of the remaining metal for the album. The former is more aggressive and heavier, featuring a lot of dissonant riff work and some of the faster drumming on the album, while the latter is an utterly doomy crawl capped off by some piercing synths towards its tail end. Balancing them, “Braying of 70,000” has the dense atmosphere of a synthetic cavern ritual with its dripping synths, tribal percussion, and lo-fi chants, while I would dare to say “Congress With the Void” manages to be desolately beautiful on its strummed chords and emotive leads, even with the harsh whispers lurking around its fringes.
Taken in total with its visual aesthetic and tasteful production, Rift is a triumph of atmosphere and variety within a blackened death metal template. Which honestly makes it sting that the album just barely manages to clock in at half an hour. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s any problems with the pacing of Rift, and Amphisbaena makes every single second count, but it’s one of those rare few albums that ends well before I feel like I’ve had enough. That’s a great problem to have when restarting the album only takes a couple taps of a button, but it does make me hope the band doesn’t take terribly long writing a follow up.
For what it is though, Rift is an outstanding debut for this metal semi-supergroup. Every track is confident and intent in its writing, and Amphisbaena‘s musicality across the board is outstanding. Within a mere half hour, Amphisbaena has conglomerated blackened death metal, ritual ambient music, prog, and post-rock into a working whole and honed it into darkly shining cohesion. Whatever portal the band has opened with Rift, I welcome whatever comes spilling out.
