Rating: 9.4

Country: USA

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: Listenable

Track list:
1. Hate's Plague
2. Passion Kill
3. World Agony
4. Tarnished
5. The Weight of Devotion
6. Breathing the Dark
7. Deliverer of Evil
8. Shadows in the Light
9. Lying With Demons
10. Whispering Death

Band Website: Immolation

Immolation - Shadows In The Light

Ross Dolan - Bass, Vocals
Steve Shalaty - Drums
Bill Taylor - Guitar
Bob Vigna - Guitar

Two years after releasing an album on which they flirted with death metal convention, New York trail blazers Immolation have returned to doing what they've always done best - defying it.

Shadows In the Light sees the quartet bringing back the neck-snapping angular compositions, epic guitar leads and ominous harmonic dissonance that made them among the pace-setters for innovation and atmosphere in their genre for the previous decade. The album kicks off with "Hate's Plague", which is the band's shortest song to date, and among the most brutal, highlighted by an absolutely devastating mid-paced bridge section that tells the listener that Immolation have re-dedicated themselves to creating the sickest and most twisted riffs in extreme metal. But the album doesn't really kick into high gear until the second track, "Passion Kill", which really takes fans back to the band's Metal Blade days, with a bludgeoning opening riff a-la the Failures For Gods album, which transitions into a flurry of lighting-quick chord progressions involving a variety of intervals, the kind that typified the landmark Close To A World Below - a wall of noise for the uninitiated listener - and climaxes in a razor-sharp lead harmonic that has Bob Vigna doing some Jedi-like octave jumping.

The next three songs: "World Agony", "Tarnished" and "The Weight of Devotion" continue the assault in an exhibition of the kind of varied and unpredictable songcraft that typified Immolation albums until Harnessing Ruin came along. Each of these tracks contains absolutely brilliant lead/rhythm interplay, punctuated by eerie harmonies, multiple tempo shifts and some of the best solos that Vigna has ever concocted. And while the general feeling of the record is one of controlled chaos, it's definitely not without groove - and not the kind of Pantera-esque chugga-chugga-mosh groove that you'd hear on a lot of other current death metal releases. Immolation's take on groove is saturated with slides, bends, trills and pinches that give the breakdown riffs a convincingly hellish atmosphere that's a far cry from the ham-fisted, low-brow 'brutality' that most of their contemporaries continue to regurgitate.

"Breathing the Dark", the sixth track, is actually a throwback to some of the most experimental songs on the Here In After album - a slow-to-mid-paced juggernaut that effectively carries across a sense of bleakness and suffering that the lyrics depict. Lyrics that, as it were, would seem rather cheesy if they were not accompanied by such sophisticated music. But there are two tracks towards the end of the album that stand head and shoulders above the rest. One is the terrorism-themed mini-epic title track that has the band projecting their contempt for organized religion and its corrosive effects into very real and very terrifying terms, and closing with a grandiose riff that can honestly be described as Wagnerian. The other is the finale, "Whispering Death", which masterfully recaptures the feel of classic Immolation closers like "Christ's Cage", "The Devil I Know" and "Close To A World Below". The structure of this song is more straightforward than the rest of the album, but the riffing is simply [un]godly.

But rest assured that while this album certainly recalls elements of previous Immolation albums, at no point does it feel like the band is simply rehashing riffs - a mistake they made on Harnessing Ruin, which kept the album from being up to snuff with the rest of their catalogue. Calling the music here "classic Immolation" does not mean that it's a retread, but rather that much like the band's 1991-2002 era, it shames most of its peers in its ingenuity, whereas Harnessing Ruin frequently felt like it could've been written by any number of other death metal bands. In short, they've stopped trying to be Bolt Thrower and returned to being Immolation.

November 25th, 2007