Reviews: Midnight Realm, Ageless Summoning, Phoenix Lake, Chapel Floods (Reviews By Matt Bladen)

Midnight Realm – Engineering The Apocalypse (Self Released)

A concept record based around the psyche of a character called ‘The Architect’, the theme to this debut album by British metal mob has a bit of Nostradamus meets The Umbrella Academy about it. It’s told through the medium of melodeath/metalcore/modern heavy metal that features impassioned scream/clean vocals, thrashy riffs, pit inducing drum patterns and a few choice breakdowns. Though to win over a wider crowd they use strings and synths along with classic metal styling to give their sound a wider palate to work from. Similar to Architects or Sylosis or even American’s like Trivium, Midnight Realm manage to pinpoint what makes this music great but expand upon it at the same time.

Part of that is the musicianship, the rhythm section of Patrick Deans (drums) and new boy Chris Diboll (bass) laying down a crushing, rampaging foundation for these songs ready for shreddy, thrashy, biting guitars from Daniel Russell and Kirk Hepburn, though the solos are provided by Benjamin Ellis of Scar Symmetry and Alex Bailie from Cognizance. With such a powerful, experienced set of compositions, they begin by battering you as soon as I, The Architect gets going at lightspeed, Kirk Hepburn’s growls and roars ripping your head off from the first moment, the orchestrations nuanced in the background to increase the audio effect. Kudos to Owain Willams’ mixing/mastering to make it all sound huge. On The Rebuild, a reimagined take on their 2015 single, they have Sarah Dee of Solarus duet with Kirk for more emotional bite, though his vocals are brilliant by themselves both harsh and clean as the classic metal twin harmonies come in on Kings Will Crawl. 

For me though it’s the final twosome of The Oncoming Storm and Polemos that exhibit how good Midnight Realm are, the former has a slow steady build with lots of piano-led introspection, shifting between clean emotional bits and heavy aggression, before the latter is an 8 minute heavy prog metal track with long steamrolling breakdown outro. Engineering The Apocalypse has had a long gestation period but it has arrived a definitive statement from Midnight Realm. Hopefully they make their way down from Newcastle to play it live. 9/10

Ageless Summoning - Corrupting The Entempled Plane (Dark Descent Records)

Death metal from Scotland inspired by Morbid Angel, Immolation and the Eldritch Horrors of H.P Lovecraft? Count me in! Corrupting The Entempled Plane is the debut full length from Ageless Summoning, who take from the “Steve Tucker era Morbid Angel” where the technicality is met with sheer brute force. Brilliantly bludgeoning with tracks such as Epoch Of Souls creating gloomy atmospheres of warped hellscapes, guitars from Gregg Cowell and Rory Strachan, dive bomb and swirl in a hypnotic menagerie of noise, while the blast beating of Hamish MacKintosh is unrelenting. 

They are a band who welcome and strive for the slower, more punishing side of death metal, Among The Worms crawling from the dirt with sludgy distortion from Derek Wright’s bass; as Incarcerate Nothingness uses repetition brilliantly to bring forcefulness before shifting into more squealing, frenzied solos. Ageless Summoning features members from bands such as Of Spire & Throne, Haar, Úir, Scordatura, and Abyssal, so they are old hands at making horrible noises. So together they unleash tracks such as the furious Towards The Fractal Absolute, the pace notably quicker than the songs before it, though with Ali Lander’s vocals never seem to move away from bowel churning no matter the speed of the songs. 

On a record where there is so much brutality, it’s easy to forget the virtuosity of the band, but it’s there in the progressive playing that drives songs like Retribution Eternal. Paying homage to the American masters in their own way Ageless Summoning explore horros from beyond the stars with their debut album. 8/10

 
Phoenix Lake – Beyond The Flames (Self Released)

Beyond The Flames, is according to the band is a “prelude to the first album”, so what do Phoenix Lake bring to the table? Well if you were listening to Faithless, you would be thinking why BFMV have changed their singer as this is radio-friendly modern metal/metalcore, but a track such as Come Alive has a wealth of symphonic metal behind it, with Lacuna Coil coming to mind. The focus of the band is vocalist Lana Phillis, she has a ‘rock’ voice rather than the more classically trained singers around, so it they can be a bit more creative with their songwriting. 

Allowing tracks such as Reflections to be heavy but with melodies too and empowering lyrics. This idea of self-improvement and reflection is used throughout the EP, Saviour about being helpless and lost but believing in yourself to pull through. Written mostly before the pandemic, it means that Phoenix Lake were able to rework and rerecord these tracks to make them sound as widescreen as they do here. Beyond The Flames is Phoenix Lake moving away from their former life as Descending Angels and into a new existence, one that is armed with some very modern sounding metal music. 7/10

Chapel Floods – Chapel Floods EP (Self Released)

After multiple failed starts, guitarists, vocalists and drummers Rotherham band Chapel Floods have finally returned with a new(ish) EP. Locked in as a trio now, the sludge band follow up their 2020 demo by re-recording 2 songs from that demo along with 2 new tracks kicking off their next batch of recordings. Recorded live/mixed and mastered in their studio, it kicks off with the sludgy Grief Mason, where the raging screams shift into crooning cleans, turning into WAH which is psychedelic grumbling and dissonance. Time Servers goes into doom as echoed guitar cleans, broad drumming and more despondent vocals are the order of the day. This second EP finishes with the throbbing stoner/sludge of Crooked Noose and reframes Chapel Floods for their next chapter. 7/10