When at Night somehow try to tell us that their blend of melodic death metal and hardcore is part of their artistic expression. Something to do with their Weltanschauung (translating as “world view”), maybe? I just hoped that this less than blinding revelation was surpassed by the quality of their music. One ray of hope was that one of the band’s members plays in Inner Earth, who released a jolly good album earlier this year.
The nondescript intro bore no apparent relation to the first melodic death metal song “Philistine”. It steams along darkly. The riff is strong, and for sure it’s technically competent but didn’t get me leaping out of my chair. As I reflected while listening to “Quietus”, it occurred to me that this sounded like a hundred bands, but with a nod towards Finland and Sweden. Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga goes the song. I do like the driving energy even if it is somewhat mechanical. There’s the odd tempo change and the instrumental finery is nicely done, avoiding irritating ostentation. “Past Silent Lament” is dirtier and heavier, and stands somewhere between thrash and death metal. It’s like three or four songs in one. Now I’m fine about complex structures but in this case, it seems to bounce around as if it’s not clear what direction the song is taking. At the end of its seven minutes, I was none the wiser. Yet the constituent parts of the song are decent and powerful, and there’s an epic type chorus in amongst the panoply of death metal riffs and switches. The song ends suddenly like its predecessors. When at Night can’t be accused of lacking ideas. It’s how they mould them that was mystifying me.
A familiar deathly rumble kicks off “Yonder”. Having driven on inspiringly for a few minutes, “The Wretched Nothing” takes over and continues the well, wretched journey. And where’s the hardcore in all this? In fact, it could do with something like that, because hardcore has the very edge which this album lacks. The growling singer might as well have been reading the news about the gas prices. At least “Sands Fall” has nice melodies and the drum work is good as ever, and for once I felt the ascendancy of the song instead of the straight line or mixed up affairs which preceded it. “High Priests of Avarice” cracks on at a fair lick, and there’s a nice menacing section about four minutes in. Once again it stops abruptly but there’s a decent bit of energy about this song. Now these last two songs had finally made me sit up a bit, but just as the intro seemed to be a different time and place from the rest of the album, so too is the outro, which happens to be title track. Well, I’m sure When at Night must know why they needed to plunge us into instrumental gloom and close it all up this way. They may call it artistic expression. I call it incongruous.
It got to the stage that I found myself listening to this album out of obligation. It’s a strange thing because the musicianship is fine, there is energy and the ambiance that you’d expect of death metal, but for me the structures of “Weltanschauung” left me with nothing to get hold of and therefore cold. At other times it ploughed on as if the band was under a contractual obligation to get done. Moreover, this desultory album rarely got above second gear on the excitement scale in spite of its fastness and hardness. I honestly felt no engagement with this album. I’m sure someone out there will be able to take it apart and appreciate it more than me.
(4/10 Andrew Doherty)
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