Mass Burial: The Black Dahlia Murder, Nightbringers

This is an exciting review. It marks the end of another Mass Burial project, one that introduced me to a band I was unfamiliar with and yielded a lot of positive exposure. It made me a fan of a new band, one that I had consciously ignored for many years. And, it concludes with a brand new album, released in 2017, so I can add another current year record to my list of things I’ve heard this year.

Nightbringers is the newest offering from The Black Dahlia Murder, and it, as all the other ones have, borrows elements from the bands’ past works and plays them up into a generally successful listen. This time, it seems that the slower, heavier parts of Deflorate are back and in the spotlight, as Nightbringers is a generally . . . not slower, although that would be accurate. “Slower” I think would read as a negative, and the decreased tempo of songs is not at all a negative thing. No, the album strives for a heavier feeling, letting go of the emphasis on lightning-fast riffage and pacing. A short 33 minutes, the album feels like a much more satisfying experience because it offers some variation in content.

The fantastic track “Kings of the Nightworld” is the first real rager of a track, the albums’ sixth. Opener “Windowmaker” is a great first song, but then things settle in to a groove, a bit slower and chunkier and generally better pace than previous albums. The records I’ve really liked, or at least two of them, offer some difference among songs. Miasma ad Deflorate change things up a bit over their run time, while the debut and an album like Nocturnal or Everblack are off to the races from the press of Play. The faster albums have been good, but they tend to run together in sonic blurs of about 30 minutes, making the better tracks slightly memorable while the other tracks are just there. Albums like Abysmal and Nightbringers let the music breathe a bit, and thus end up being better. I think it really takes an album like Abysmal or Nightbringers to help you realize the monotony of the previous ones.

The album is bookended by the slow building intro of “Widowmaker” and the fading out of “The Lonely Deceased,” creating an atmosphere of a complete listening experience. The fact that the album reaches its halfway point before unleashing its best and most exciting song, “Kings of the Nightworld” means that said track appears as a truly exciting moment, maximizing the impact. It’s a good, catchy song, but I wonder if it would have blended in to the nonstop barrage of previous albums and their breakneck paces. Also, the subtle excellent of “Jars,” a song about keeping and eating human flesh, is one of those “I Will Return” level surprises.

Over the course of Abysmal and Nightbringers, I think it is apparent that The Black Dahlia Murder has matured as musicians. Seemingly gone are the days of albums one through six, where the band’s velocity and ferocity were their best assets and they themselves knew it; here are the days where the band is more comfortable in the notion that they can write music that varies and changes without compromising or losing their style and identity. This is not an easy realization for a band to come to. But, it often does make for much better bands. By their own admission, they were trying something different with Ritual, something that they believed was quintessentially them, but that may have just been the start of a band trying to reach out from what made them what they were at the time. Now, over the last two records, they actually do seem to be doing whatever is quintessentially them, but it is working out so much better, and so much more satisfyingly, and so much more interestingly.

Early I mentioned monotony among the earlier albums, and I did not mean that in a pejorative sense. They are not monotonous in the regard of them being boring or bad or dull; they are monotonous because they could essentially be one long 30-minute song for the lack of true variation among tracks. It’s not even a matter of track listing or order, as all the other albums don’t have a “Kings of the Nightword” that is different: the other albums are ENTIRELY “Kings of the Nightworld,” so there is not really any kind of variance to be had, let alone put to use. It is truly admirable that the band was able to write five or six albums that all followed in the same mold and managed to produce five or six independently valuable and viable albums, instead of writing two good ones and a bunch of copycats. They do get accused of that, but I can’t support it. Even if the albums are similar they are still of quality, which is a rarity in the genre. Carnal Forge released some good albums that are mostly interchangeable, but eventually reached a point where they were no longer interesting. So familiarity certainly does breed disinterest, but The Black Dahlia Murder seems to have found ways to circumvent that. So maybe monotony is the wrong word, but the right idea. It’s not that the albums are generally the same as each other, it’s that the albums are generally the same as each other. Glad we got that cleared up.

In the long run, my exposure to The Black Dahlia Murder has been a good one, and yielded a genuine interest in the band, as well as I think a real appreciation for their output. While I can’t quite say that I’ve developed a fandom on par with my friend who inspired this exercise, I can definitely say that I’ll be keeping them in my album rotation; they honestly seem to be a perfect gym band: short, fast albums, perfect for a jaunt on the treadmill or a spin through the weights. I honestly don’t understand the amount of blowback they get from certain elements of the scene, unless it is simply the old standby response to a band that gets popular, and is therefore terrible. I have never truly understood that mindset. I can understand ignoring a band because they get popular, or growing fatigued at constantly hearing about a band as it rises to stardom, or maybe even being upset that a band you know and love has begun to register on the radars of the mainstream or other audiences. That does sometimes feel personally irksome, but shouldn’t really be a thing we get mad about. While no one has to like a band like this, and I myself am real hit or miss on their overall genre, The Black Dahlia Murder is a quality unit that at least deserves a nod for consistency and quality. What they really should get is a high five for being consistently good and solid musicians. If it took them until their seventh and eighth albums to get their writing and delivery set without releasing any true stinkers along the way, these guys could be doing good work for a long time to come. That is pretty exciting.