What Lives Beneath - Ancient Rivalry
Welcome to your Renegade Reviews: Quick Bite for the week of June 8th! This week, I’m checking out the debut album from the UK Death Metal band Ancient Rivalry – What Lives Beneath. The band was kind enough to reach out to me to give me an early listen, which I’m always thankful for!
If you’ve followed my reviews over the years, you’ll know by now that my taste in Death Metal has waned over the years and isn’t the specific Metal subgenre I gravitate toward, mostly due to the vocal style. I’ve always found the instrumentation to be satisfying, but the often monotone low growls can either bore me or drone on after a while. For my tastes, that sentiment continues to apply, even with What Lives Beneath. Across the eight songs, I was impressed by the writing and playing, the sheer brutality, and the band's timeless sound. The component that brought the experience down for me was the lack of variety in the vocals (again, this is a personal taste thing). I like to hear some highs, some lows, some mids, etc, which I find helps break the songs up a bit. Because of the vocals being mostly one-note, I found that the majority of the album blended together, feeling like one long song, rather than eight individual tracks of brutality. It’s difficult to criticize it for what I feel is a weakness when in reality, it technically accomplishes what you’d expect from a Death Metal record. As a side note that made me chuckle – the entire time I listened to the record, I could have sworn I was listening to Nathan Explosion from Deathklok. I promise I don’t mean that as an insult, as I do unironically enjoy Deathklok, but it still painted a funny visual in my mind the entire time.
Hopefully you don’t take my review as all negative, though. While What Lives Beneath may not 100% be my cup of tea, it’s still a brutal, blistering, loud Death Metal album that is worth checking out if you enjoy heavy music and especially if you are a big Death Metal fan! Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think!