Immolation - Atonement

Pitchfork 77

In the early ’90s, death metal luminaries like Death’s Chuck Schuldiner and Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth introduced technicality to the raw, guttural template they’d pioneered a few years earlier. At that point, death metal became a haven for artists who not only placed a high premium on chops but also thought of themselves as capital-C composers. (Gorguts bandleader Luc Lemay, for example, actually took private lessons in composition from a nun.) But over the genre’s 30-year creep from the fringes to respectability, we still don’t think of it as a songwriter’s artform. That’s not necessarily fair, as it takes enormous skill to wrest hooks from such harsh tones.

On Atonement, the 10th long-player from the New York-based second wave death metal outfit Immolation, guitarist Robert Vigna delivers a masterclass on songwriting in this framework. A cohesive listen from start to finish, Atonement contains twists, turns, peaks, and valleys galore—a remarkable achievement considering that Immolation haven’t modified their approach all that much since their 1991 debut Dawn of Possession. Atonement, in fact, begins with a short, detuned clean guitar phrase that reacquaints listeners with Vigna’s preference for scales that sound as if they’re warping under his fingertips.

As with so many of his peers, Vigna likes to play squealing leads that he double-tracks in discordant harmonies to create a queasy feeling of gloom. But he also possesses an unparalleled knack for injecting melody into his riffs without watering-down the heaviness or resorting to the inflated bombast of symphonic death metal. (Though former Goreaphobia/Incantation guitarist Alex Bouks joined Immolation last year, Vigna still plays all of the parts on the album, as he’s done for much of the band’s history.) Vigna crafted the album as a batch of songs you can actually hum along to. Looking back, how many of the genre’s all-time classics can we say that about?

Even when compared to Immolation’s back catalog, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more riveting string of transitions between songs. After a series of blast beats and double bassdrum rolls, second track “When the Jackals Come” opens out onto an epic climax where Vigna guitars wail like a chorus of air raid sirens. Here, in a drawn-out ending that takes nearly as long as the song’s main section, the music lends itself to the apocalyptic scenery the album cover depicts. “Their war is already won,” sings vocalist/bassist Ross Dolan, “your world will end when the jackals come”—a typical death metal lyric about societal collapse that takes on an unusually profound sense of tragedy thanks to the dolefulness in the music.

In a great sequencing move, “When the Jackals Come” simmers down onto the eerie drone that introduces “Fostering the Divide,” which hints at Vigna and Dolan’s affinity for the gothy ambient darkness of non-metal acts like Dead Can Dance. And though the drone component remains quite subtle throughout the album, mixer Zack Ohren leaves ample room for drummer Steve Shalaty’s intricate cymbal patterns to come to the front and color even the most dense passages. Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.

Immolation have recorded with producer Paul Orofino since their third album, 1999’s Failures for Gods. By this point, the band’s work flow is well entrenched. Likewise, Dolan’s preoccupation with religious and political institutions as agents of evil is still as fervent as it was from day one. At times, Dolan breathes a contemporary edge into his lyrics. “Jackals” was inspired by John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, while “Fostering the Divide” aligns perfectly with the contentious tone of American politics (even if it doesn’t explicitly address the recent presidential election). Mostly, though, Dolan isn’t saying anything he hasn’t said before. In a sense, neither is Vigna. But in death metal, consistency is the name of the game, and it’s harder than it looks. If a band can “say” the same thing for 30 years while delivering it with more flourish than they ever have, as Immolation have done with Atonement, then that really says something.