Absolute Purity - Alas

...ocean").

1. Absolute Purity
2. The Enchanted
3. Endlessly Searching
4. Silencing the Sorrow
5. Loss of a Life
6. Tragedies
7. Quest for Serenity
8. Rejection of What You Perceive
9. Surmounting the Masses
10. Longing for Destiny

Disappointingly, and surprisingly considering the album's apparent "progressive" intentions, the majority of these ...
...couple of distinguishing touches such as a change in vocal style or the use of double bass drumming to set them apart. None stand out as particularly great, with only tracks four, six and seven earning a place very slight above average. Among the least successful tracks are those that make the castrated death metal sound all too obvious ('Loss of a Life,' 'Rejection of What You Perceive'), with Rutan's melodeath riffs and Davis' restrained drums ... more

Alas, here we have another death metal guitarist setting up a side project to extend his repertoire, when he should have stuck to his day job. And being guitarist for Hate Eternal, after spending considerable time with Morbid Angel, is pretty cool as far as day jobs go.

Alas is Erik Rutan's one-off (so far) operatic progressive metal project, which essentially means slowed-down melodic death metal riffs over stilted drums, with a shrieking woman placed on top. These projects can sometimes work very well, as was the case for Cynic spin-off Aghora, but here it falls rather flat, and becomes increasingly tedious as the album plods along. Rutan's riffs and solos demonstrate his obvious talent, but all sound like completely generic melodeath played at an insultingly pedestrian pace, leaving Howard Davis (of Lover of Sin) to provide some creativity with the drums that hold up remarkably well considering the limitations imposed on heaviness and power.

Just as every growling death metal bloke sounds indistinguishable from the rest, tenor Martina Astner sounds pretty much exactly the same as the other women alternating between soft singing and bombastic opera wails in gothic metal bands around the world, but her background with Sweden's opera metal godfathers Therion at least proves she's one of the more competent, only becoming too piercing and deplorable in select songs. One problem that she isn't necessarily accountable for are the absolutely abominable lyrics, littered with the worst, most basic and desperate rhymes and the most simplistic emotional subject matter extrapolated from each song title ("Come enter my realm of emotion ... Come swim in my rumbling ocean").

1. Absolute Purity
2. The Enchanted
3. Endlessly Searching
4. Silencing the Sorrow
5. Loss of a Life
6. Tragedies
7. Quest for Serenity
8. Rejection of What You Perceive
9. Surmounting the Masses
10. Longing for Destiny

Disappointingly, and surprisingly considering the album's apparent "progressive" intentions, the majority of these songs sound more or less the same, with only a couple of distinguishing touches such as a change in vocal style or the use of double bass drumming to set them apart. None stand out as particularly great, with only tracks four, six and seven earning a place very slight above average. Among the least successful tracks are those that make the castrated death metal sound all too obvious ('Loss of a Life,' 'Rejection of What You Perceive'), with Rutan's melodeath riffs and Davis' restrained drums struggling to hold themselves back from the sort of thrashing, hammering sounds they are more accustomed to producing, and sounding half-hearted as a result in this unanimously mid-tempo recording.

Martina Astner's operatic wails help to make this more of a love-it-or-hate-it album, but the later success of bands such as Finland's Nightwish have helped to make the idea more accessible, while consequently more tired and less inventive. Astner's voice works well through most of the album, particularly on the early songs that see her experiment with an even distribution of traditional singing and opera in the title track, before largely abandoning opera in the second and trying out an Eastern singing style in the third, and then realising her first idea was the best after all by the quite good 'Silencing the Sorrow.' The only times her voice really lets the recording down are in the slightly annoying fifth track, and the piercing 'Surmounting the Masses,' her swan song that comes off sounding like a dying swan in a more gritty, realistic way than Tchaikovsky envisaged. Although the closing instrumental is disappointing at best, offering four minutes for the guitarist to show off his talents with something a little different that he manages to mess up completely, it's nice that the vocals were allowed to go home early.

For the most part, the instruments work well together and never try to show off at the expense of the music, something that's always a danger with a side-project like this, but they also fail to come up with anything truly original that hasn't been done before, and would go on to be reproduced many times after. Keyboards are used sparingly to add a nice, more epic atmosphere that works most effectively in 'Quest for Serenity,' and Rutan's wealth of experience lets him know when to quieten down and let the drums, bass guitar and vocals carry verses along, making his eventual return with energetic riffs and solos all the more effective. It's still clear however that he's used to the style of death metal, where deliberately slowing the pace can make a chorus all the more hard-hitting and enjoyable, but applying such techniques here in songs like 'The Enchanted' really doesn't have the same effect, and only makes the song seem more dull and lethargic. Davis' drums come across the same problem as they attempt to introduce faster and more dynamic elements that only become lost behind the mediocre, middling pace.

'Absolute Purity' is essentially a disappointment from one of the more creative and talented figures still operating in the classic death metal scene. This clearly has an intended appeal to fans of Tampa Bay death metal as much as European gothic metal, but diluted in this manner it ends up sounding like the weakest melodic death metal band with a girl added for appeal to female fans and the sort of adolescent boys who continue to find the introduction of oestrogen into manly heavy metal a truly orgasmic and surprising idea, and one that at least allows them to justify their sexual orientation in spite the bare-chested, hairy guys plastered over their walls. 

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