Review: Pyrrhic Defeat – In Audentia, Arx
Artist: Pyrrhic Defeat Album: In Audentia, Arx Release: Oct 18, 2019 Label: Winter of Our Discontent Records Genre: Progressive Death Metal/Black Metal Length: 58:08 Track Listing:
Abuse of the Kardashev Scale (7:31)
The Pen of Damocles (3:37)
Asylum in Audacity (10:18)
Loxodrome (5:35)
The Futility of Dinosaurian Existence (8:31)
Antepenultimate (7:12)
5700 Angstroms (3:19)
A Forest of Mighty Oaks Planted 200 Years Ago for Ships That Were Never Built (12:05)
I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for odd time signatures. We didn’t get much into them when I was in high school, but we did have more of a foray into them than, I gather, most schools—sure, we played the staples such as a jazz-band arrangement of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” or the theme to Mission: Impossible composed by Lalo Schifrin, but we also did a few one-shots: Jay Bocook’s “At Dawn they Slept” had a single measure of 7/8 in it, and the time-signature changes in “The Gathering of the Ranks at Hebron”, composed by David Hol, were, I’m sure, a source of much dismay to the other students (and, if I’m being honest, to me as well). Pyrrhic Defeat’s debut album—Exceptionless Victory—had no shortage of them. Have no fear, because their sophomore outing, In Audentia, Arx, also shows no lack of odd-time segments.
I can’t wax on about the merits of unconventional meters in Western music for too long a time, however, and you won’t be able to judge the actual artistic merits of the album if I do. So what does In Audentia, Arx deliver in terms of a listening experience? Does it live up to its title (Latin for “in audacity, refuge”—I sense that the band enjoys TV Tropes)? The sixty-four-kilodollar question: Is it worth it?
I think so.
One thing that will immediately be clear to those familiar with Exceptionless Victory is the recording quality. In Audentia, Arx dips its feet into the deliberate lo-fi crappiness of the black metal scene, but it does so judiciously. That is to say, it’s clear it’s an artistic choice and it’s not an all-pervading schema; it doesn’t sound like they recorded the album on a boom box of 1990s vintage, but there is some grittiness there linking them to the metal underground whence they bubbled up. There’s that definite “like Between the Buried and Me but harder” vibe that defined Exceptionless Victory, but it feels like a natural evolution.
Abuse of the Kardashev Scale begins with what I think is an odd choice, befitting the album title: It fades in over a period of about forty seconds. As befits the title, which…well…refers to the Kardashev Scale, there’s definite sci-fi underpinnings running through this track. Dahlquist’s viola work is at peak performance here, and I believe there’s some passages where they used a Mellotron. At its core, though, it’s a thoroughly progressive (I think I counted 47 time signature changes) and facially-obviously metal track. For fans of Between the Buried and Me, think The Parallax II: Future Sequence mixed with the unchecked intensity of Alaska.
I think the turn of phrase that is the title of The Pen of Damocles is utterly brilliant. For those who don’t know, in classical mythology, Damocles was a king who sat on a throne above which was suspended a sword on a fraying rope that threatened to snap and drop on him at any minute (cf. Shakespeare’s “heavy lies the head that wears the crown”). This song had more of a punk or thrash feel to it, not that that’s a bad thing—it had me thinking of a heavier, more raw version of Boris.
I don’t know if you can call this an “eponymous” or “titular” track or not, but Asylum in Audacity is as haunting as it is technically skilled. It sounds like they took avant-garde jazz harmonization theory and actually made it melodious, though how they did that on the fly is anyone’s guess.
The one song I’m ambivalent about on this album is Loxodrome. It feels like a significant misfire—the pieces are all there, but someone skipped a section of the enclosed instruction book and the thing that got put together is lopsided and can’t stand up. I think a big part of this is an overuse of the Mellotron; its notes saturate the track. It’s interesting, and I guess you could say I don’t outright despise it, but maybe the best way to think of it is a failed experiment that the scientists decided to publish anyway.
If you want to get depressed about everything, spend five minutes on Twitter. If you don’t have Twitter, The Futility of Dinosaurian Existence is the next-best thing. It’s mostly a plodding, brooding song, notably at a significantly lower tempo than the rest of the album for most of its runtime, not quite to doom levels of Sunn O))) or even Candlemass, but not groovy enough to qualify as sludge à la, say, Sleep. It is nonetheless enjoyable, and I found it a nice palate-cleanser from Loxodrome. The lyrics were written when Brubaker was in the middle of a major depressive episode; in an interview somewhere on YouTube he said his psychiatrist told him to write a poem expressing how he felt and that ended up becoming the first quarter of the song.
And then we come to the third-to-last song on the album. (Its title literally means “third-to-last”; Pyrrhic Defeat like to flex on non-Latin speakers, apparently. Who knew?) If Loxodrome was a failed experiment, on Antepenultimate they got the formula right. It’s largely driven by Dahlquist’s viola and the Mellotron and actually has some flavors reminiscent of The Knife in conjunction with Planningtorock, of all things. They seem to have found the recipe for the secret sauce.
5700 Angstroms is short, sweet (inasmuch as you can call anything on this album “sweet”), and to the point. It’s got an industrial streak in it that would make Nine Inch Nails fans feel at home. It sounds like it was recorded live in the studio; there’s a few timing glitches and the audio quality is noticeably more lo-fi than on the rest of the album.
And then we get to A Forest of Mighty Oaks Planted 200 Years Ago for Ships That Were Never Built, the magnum opus of this work, whose name was taken from the former title of an Atlas Obscura article. If you like Blut Aus Nord or Cattle Decapitation—yes, those are…somewhat disparate, I am aware—you’ll enjoy this. Despite its runtime, it never feels like it drags or goes on too long; the headbanging musical phrases are all just the right length to not get stale and leave you wanting more, and the musicianship is in top form throughout. It’s definitely my favorite track on the album (and the best metal song name in years).
TL;DR – 10/10, 12/10 with rice.
— Galen B.