With their debut full length, Of Terror and the Supernatural, Detroit's Temple of Void carry this long tradition forward with a punishing, fully realized musical statement.
The punishment arrives immediately. Staccato down strokes anchor the main riff of "The Embalmer's Art" and flood from the speakers in a near continuous flurry interrupted only by brief tempo shifts at the turnarounds.
This sort of relentless, power-chord riffing creates a layering effect by contrasting repetition with a quickly resolved progression. Tempo shifts never cause this band to meander - this five piece plays slower passages with every bit of the same power and focus heard in different sections.
Mike Erdody's vocals are atmospheric and comprehensible - an ideal combination for his approach. "Savage Howl" embraces the opener's intensity, but develops it further. The band's songwriting is impressive on many levels and an important aspect is cohesion. You won't often read about the quality of a death metal lyric, but the words for "Savage Howl" approximate the music's intensity. Axe slingers Alex Awn and Eric Blanchard play with great chemistry.
Temple of Void further proves their chops with the time signature challenges of "Beyond the Ultimate". Initially, the disjointed riffing made it difficult to come to grips with this track, but while the band is certainly interested in challenging themselves, the song's move into more conventional tempos is key to its success. The stunning guitar work includes brief bursts of dual lead and surprisingly melodic touches. "Beyond the Ultimate" ranks as one of the album's best tracks, though one of its least accessible. "Invocation of Demise" has echoes of a good old-fashioned stomper driving things under the dry fire of the guitars. Jason Pearce's bulldozer drumming drives the band through each movement with such straightforward precision and shows tremendous attention to the guitars exploding around him.
Mike Erdody's acoustic guitar work on the instrumental "To Carry This Corpse Evermore" is a nothing less than a revelation. If the preceding four songs fail to convince a serious listener of the band's talents, this must or forego all hope for your hearing. Erdody's composition has real sophistication. Listen carefully to the darker notes coloring otherwise shimmering textures and how slight shifts in tempo suggest emotional dynamics as strong as any embodied in earlier songs. "Rot In Solitude" returns the band to its traditional fare, but the old-school vibe heard in "Invocation of Demise" makes itself felt once again. The band finds a memorable groove and rides with it, adding flourishes along the way, and locking in on steady march.
"Exanimate Gaze" has another strong groove mixing the guitars' muscular charge with frequent lead breaks. Nearing the end of the album, certain elements emerge. The recording is full of seemingly extraneous noise - picks scraping guitar strings and extended fade-outs, as an example. No song on the album seems to begin, per se, as it does "happen", leaping from each track change, and throttling you. I hear it is as a deliberate approach and if the band's intent is for these deceptively simple things to add to a feeling that this is a white-knuckled, live and five on the floor blast of metal fury, they've succeeded. Admirably.
"Bargain In Death", the album's closer, clocks in at almost eleven minutes. One can scoff at the clichéd idea of young band's "epic" final track, but the cliché lies more with the countless bands that get it wrong rather than truly worthwhile finales. The requirements are few. The first and most important requirement is that, for the extra time a band is asking for, a listener is entitled to hear a recapitulation of the album's best music, albeit in a different form. However, the band needs to tie this into a larger statement that somehow drives their point of view or the end of their story, into the memory with added emphasis. This is the album's best track. It is every bit of the multi-part epic laid out above - a coherent restatement of the album's strengths with dynamic riffing and incendiary solos. However, the band stretches out here and incorporates new elements like voice over narration for atmosphere and extended solos.
Temple of Void is fully rounded. This is a band equally capable of stretching your imagination or giving you claustrophobia. Echoes of the past streak their music, but not a single not smacks of imitation. Temple of Void, instead, is boiling over with a potent combination of power, originality, and ambition that will propel them far into the future.
Words: J. Hillenburg
Bandcamp