Album review: Daath – The Concealers

Questions abound around Daath. For example, just how pervasive is their interest in Kabbalah? I’m pretty sure that’s what Madonna’s wackadoo cult calls itself, but I rather suspect the Atlanta-based band are more interested in the Hebrew mythology that allegedly informs it; they don’t sound like the type of band who’d pay three-figure sums for bottles of mineral water blessed by a charlatan with too many necklaces. Of more mundane interest is the question: why did Roadrunner Records and Century Media team up to co-release The Concealers? Maybe the two biggest metal labels got caught in a tug-of-war under the influence of Daath’s ancient secrets?

All that’s academic, though; we’re here for the tunes, so let’s get to ‘em. Daath don’t waste time with lengthy intros; they spare you the metronomic bludgeon of the drumkit for maybe sixteen bars of album opener “Schatten”, but from then onwards The Concealers is a full-bore death race, with old-school grind and thrash riffs updated with surgical precision and bolstered by lead guitar escapades that even Kerry King might raise an appreciative and respectful eyebrow at. Oh, and there’s lots of angry and raw-throated bellowing, too. Not an album for the lightweights, this one.

There’s nothing new lurking on The Concealers, really; the guitar aesthetics are at least a few decades old, and the vocal patterns and delivery are reminiscent of the days when Pantera were still rewriting what modern metal rulebook. The drums are a mixture of the played and the programmed, or so it sounds to me, though Daath have made a decent job of it by including some interesting details and flourishes. And anyway, all the big name metal bands retrigger their drum sounds in ProTools, which is tantamount to using a sampler, only less honest (as well as having the frequent side-effect of making your songs sound like overproduced shite). Daath‘s percussion tracks, if anything, suffer from an excess of restraint, at least when it comes to the choice of sounds – when you think of the hellacious firestorms of programmed drums that Devin Townsend has rustled up in his time, the rhythm department of The Concealers sounds a trifle pansy by comparison.

But then again, they may well be aiming quite deliberately for this cleaner (and admittedly more spacious and groove-laden) effect in direct opposition to Townsend’s wall-of-sound approach; it lets the soaring guitars really stand out, keeps things moving without intruding too much, but occasionally comes into its own by exploiting its own unreality, as in the shattered almost-techno patterns toward the end of “The Unbinding Truth”.

Don’t let me accidentally convince you that The Concealers is a mild album, though, because it ain’t. “Silenced by Death” is the sound of a musical machine itching to chew your face off at the slightest provocation, and “Wilting on the Vine” is a fierce condemnation of… well, of something. I’ve still not quite figured it all out; it may just be the standard death and thrash staples of personal damnation in a rotten world, or it may be some way-out mystical stuff from a mouldy-paged book of Ancient Hebrew texts or something. I don’t really care; there’s a big old prog-tastic solo section just after the halfway point of the song, and that’s just fine. And the little classical break in “Day of Endless Light”? Priceless – as well as unexpectedly charming, a little glowing gem in a landscape of sheer granite angles.

And that’s about it, really; like I say, there’s nothing astonishingly new or innovative about Daath‘s music or choice of instruments, albeit done here with an ear for subtlety that has evaded many previous practitioners. What The Concealers really achieves, however, is to bundle all those well-used tropes into a powerful package that feels familiar yet fresh, never letting up the pace or dropping a dull moment of padding into the sequence. I can’t pick out any particular tracks as stand-out winners, but that’s not a bad thing at all. It’s an increasing rarity in the iTunes age, but I’ve got a soft spot for albums that are consistent from end to end, offering plenty of well thought-out variations on a basic template with power and panache, and that’s exactly what Daath have delivered here.