Major band changes are something that has happened a lot lately... In January, my old band homicidal hammerfist changed from black metal influenced power metal to black metal. Now the same thing is happening to my other band Dismembered September. The change was prompted by two things..
A) All of the band members left but me.
B) More Importantly the new cd has to be done differently for it to work.
You see the new Dismembered September (rise of the serpent) takes the thrashiness of old Dismembered September and replaces it with Mideival Black Metal instead. A HUGE change. Now the band is an Atmospheric Black Metal Band... I did this because the new album is a concept album about the story to 3 awesome mideival FPS games, Heretic, Hexen and Hexen 2. I wanted to add mideival elements into the sound, so I decided to make it an atmospheric black metal band before recording the new cd.
Atmospheric black metal is a kind of black metal that is characterized by slow long epic songs and a dream-like sound. It's a really underrated, yet popular kind of black metal now. Atmospheric black metal bands include Summoning (the genre founder), Caladan Brood, and Obsidian Tongue (a really underrated band from my state). I decided to bring my band dismembered september down this route once we broke up because our new album will need the mideival instruments (trumpet mostly) and percussion some atmospheric black metal bands use such as Kettle Drums, and others. I wanted to make a mideival black metal album to fit the theme of the games I was writing about. And I just did. It's nothing like older dismembered september (which was all blackened thrash), but it's good in it's own way...
The new cd came out good. It's split into 4 songs with vocals and 4 without. 3 out of 4 without vocals are short little interludes. The other is a long instrumental for a final track. The 4 other tracks, the ones with vocals are all long songs at least 7 mintues and 3 out of 4 of those are 8+ minutes long.. You get a very long epic feel with this album.
The influence of Summoning on this cd cannot be overstated. I've been listening to summoning for 6 months now and it's been incredible to listen to their style. I wanted to make a project that fused summoning's percussion and Trumpet playing style with Rancid Abomination melodies, keyboards and riffage. What you get when you do that is make very epic yet dark mideival black metal, perfect for a concept album on heretic/hexen games...
I really like the way the cd came out. It's dark and brooding. Something summoning does rarely to me. It's also very mideival sounding. Most of the tracks came out great. 2 of the tracks with vocals came out mixed a little off but it's not unbearable... I had to fix these 2 tracks and that's a bummer but still I love the way this cd came out...
Edit:
Here is a link to the new album... Forgot to add it till now, sorry!
http://noisetrade.com/dismemberedseptember/rise-of-the-serpent
