Frost Like Ashes - Tophet
PsychoAcoustiX Records
Symphonic/Amospheric Blackened Death Metal
10 songs (1:02:50)
Release year: 2005
Frost Like Ashes
Reviewed by Kayla

Every once in a while, I like to take on an album from a band I’ve never heard of before. After all, life is boring if you never venture outside your comfort zone, and you’ll never discover new pleasures if you don’t open yourself to them. Before their album arrived in my mailbox, I’d never heard a single note of Frost Like Ashes’s music before, and the only thing I knew about them was that they played a brand of extreme metal heavy on the blackened influences. Boy, was I in for a surprise when I delved a little deeper into them…but first, the music itself.

Tophet is a strange beast. It can’t quite decide whether it wants to be an intense, face-shredding blackened death fest or gloomy, ominous atmospheric black metal. Half the songs have soft, symphonic intros or interludes which, rather than build tension, serve more to lull the listener into a restful bit of sleep. Perhaps that’s why the last track has just under ten minutes of silence at the beginning, in a segment called All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. It’s clever when The Berzerker does it, but the shock is somewhat lessened when the rest of the album is broken up by a substantial number of softer interludes anyway.

Interludes aside, the real meat of the album isn’t bad. The most vivid impression I get from it is a blackened death layer cake, with deep, death metal grooves acting as a foundation for blackened riffing and a dual set of growled and screeched vocals. Synth melodies float on top, although they do a better job of clashing with the death metal aspects than melding with the black. The penultimate track, Lord Of Darkness, shows this off the best, with a downright catchy groove in the chorus and a vocal line that compliments the music better than most of the rest. The synth touches also work better in this song than the rest of the album, although they still clash a bit.

My biggest complaint would be with the drums. The old chestnut “everything in moderation” is a good piece of advice to keep in mind when composing extreme metal drums, especially when it comes time to add in blastbeats. I love them as much as the next metalhead, but when they comprise most of the drum line, they lose their effectiveness. Rather than soul-rippingly brutal, they become background noise, much like the buzzing of bees. When they’re not coming at you at 200 bpm or so, the drumming is decent, with interesting fills that help tie the otherwise disparate layers of sound together. The other element that doesn’t quite work is the instrumental track, Crucifixion. It simply doesn’t fit with the rest of the album, sounding more like a piffle piece composed by someone who’s been overdosing on Bach wrote for their local church to play during a Mass processional than anything that belongs on a blackened death album.

Now, I didn’t draw that particular comparison by accident. When I first looked at the cover art of Tophet, I was greeted by a dark, grainy black-and-white photo of a stave church, and upon opening the case, I found a dude in corpsepaint staring up at me with a facial expression that gave me the impression he was in the extremely unpleasant process of undergoing a firehose enema. I figured I was in for a flashback to the Norwegian scene of the nineties, a band that took its cues from the likes of Mayhem, Emperor or Immortal. I put the cd on, and as I flipped through the lyrics booklet, a sense of disbelief washed over me as I realized that these guys were singing about destroying the legions of…Satan.

I had actually managed to stumble across a Christian black metal band.

While there’s certainly nothing inherently wrong with expressing your religion through music, the idea of Christian black metal seems positively counterintuitive. Black metal itself is based on misanthropy, and even the friendliest of bands elevate nature above humankind. Taken at its best, Christianity is a religion based on love of your fellow-man, an ideal certainly not easily expressed through the brand of aural destruction commonly called black metal.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly touchy-feely about Frost Like Ashes’s lyrics. They seem to be embracing the “destroy the infidel” brand of Christianity; rather than glory in the greatness of God, they choose to take the sword to God’s enemies, glorying in their destruction. More metal than the love of Jesus, I suppose, but it still seems to run counter to the spirit of the music as I’ve always understood it. I have to give them credit for cleverness in art, though; the stave church on Tophet’s cover is completely intact, perhaps purposely referencing the cover of Burzum’s Aske, and rejecting the principles it embraces.

Overall, Frost Like Ashes have a solid set of music parts that need a little more finesse to fully gel. If they lost the synths and added some more varied drum work, they would have a respectable final product. They might run into some balking from your average black metal fan due to their lyrical content, but they’re quite obviously making the type of music they really believe in creating, which is one of the principles on which the metal world stands. As for myself, I doubt I’ll ever count myself in the Christian metal legions (if only because my ancestors might rise from their graves in the eastern European shtetl and ask me why, why, you were such a good Jewish girl, why are you doing this to your poor grandmothers?) but I can certainly respect Frost Like Ashes’s commitment to their principles.

Killing Songs :
Lord Of Darkness
Kayla quoted 58 / 100
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