Dismember - Dismember - Like an Ever-Flowing Stream...
Review: Swedish death metal became famous for its phrases of destruction interrupted by thunderous recursion, ripping themselves apart in unfolding conclusion, alternated with racing formations of fast-strummed chords flowing liquid and rhythmic like the energies that replenish life and bring the sudden violence of death.
Dismember accentuate these qualities and build simple pieces into epics through emphasis on the release from order to deconstruction, layering driftlike afterimage guitars on the obscure fast and simple riffs blasted out in syncopation with a riveted structure of vibrations supporting the entire expression in a simultaneous chain of organic events in precision correspondence to a greater event. Songs are usually a permutation of a verse-chorus infrastructure, broken into subsections and riff-salad variants to avoid the simple ratcheting loop of that contrast, held together in the basic rhythm of the drums while guitars synchronize their rhythms closer to the brutal beating that death deserves.
Vast openings peel away levels of song and reduce simple concepts to epic importance, having ritual placement within the essence of a song. The composition of each riff takes the stream of logic that power chords provide and breaks it into rhythmic components of demise, each taking the scale apart or blasting it out in a rhythm to bend its shape: conformity of the basic to a larger and aesthetically different idea, a rearrangement toward an apocalypse where the patterns of life with be dissassembled in destruction and then the pieces recontextualized with new functions in a darker universe.
Differences in tonal motion within the chords are purely a matter of relative direction, the vectors of the syncopated motion of life put into similar patterns in energetic, vitalizing, aggressive music of survival in a postapocalyptic herd. In grim championship of destruction Dismember delight in switching their rhythms from simple walk-beats supporting informative ragged chants of verse to blasting racetrack demonisms and then closing on a blast; solos are sometimes scissoring streams of chords overlaid in somewhat chaotic arrangements creating simple melody in the mysterious harmony and yet wistful dissonance, drifting into a potential-less twist of a note, gesturing toward a direction unfound before the closure of despair.
Emerging from the past toward a future of potential design this music is a hybrid of heavy metal angst and death metal practicality and emotion, forming from explosively collisive chord structures an inner beauty and sonority through the harmonizing affinity of distorted sound shaped into melody. As a result, this music has in itself an elusive passage of transcendence in which it is forever from the mud reaching toward the stars.