Omnium Gatherum’s 2003 debut, Spirits and August Light, was one of my favorite records of that year; it was catchy, melodic, and well-proportioned, and at the same time possessed a harmonic sensibility that kept it distinct from similarly classifiable specimens. That said, it’s understandable that I had my doubts when a first listen of their second record presented a sound that, while not a drastic departure from their first, nevertheless certainly demonstrated itself to be the result of some tinkering. Omnium Gatherum are Finnish, and they play melodic death metal. This alone may often be enough to give the halfway informed metal listener a fairly accurate notion of what to expect, but it is not in this case. Was not, I should say, and continues not to be. Omnium Gatherum have matured; in fact what was once appealing about them continues to be, as throughout the entire record they manage to play music which is always a little more difficult, a little obscure, but by that fact becomes vital and satisfying to hear. They are not as catchy as your average melodeath band, which is to say they more often than not forego the standard repertoire of minor-key pulloffs and scale runs of which the majority of the genre corpus is composed—indeed, they are not as catchy as they were a year prior. Rest assured: the band does not want for that quick-fingered virtuosity by which their nation has justifiably achieved its fame, though I might say that it is here exhibited with a bit more taste and moderation than it has been known to be. They are also not afraid to employ tonal shifts, chromaticism, and rhythmic innovation, resulting in a slightly more demanding listen. I must single out in particular their drummer, Jarmo Pikka—he is no hyperblasting metal god, and he does not insert a fill into every bar, or every half of one, but his tasteful and intelligent use of polyrhythm and and time changes show that he obviously knows what he’s doing, and they add a layer of depth to the proceedings. The end of ‘Black Seas Cry’, for one, is a series of rhythmic variations which do not descend into dull superfluity.
If Omnium Gatherum have a weak point—and they do—it’s their vocalist, Antti Filppu. His style of scream is not particularly expressive, and sounds sometimes strained. This does not pose a huge problem, and indeed a part of me fears that an attempt to ‘punch up’ the vocals might be the first step in the same sort of weakening and watering down that afflicts the band’s geostylistic (and linguistic; Finland’s national love of Latin is just one more little-known reason to adore that icy bastion of agglutinative alcoholism) neighbors, Mors Principium Est, on their own recent second.
They say that melodic death metal as a genre is dying, or dead, and that it is full of crap copycat bands who couldn’t write an original riff if you threatened to stomp all over their In Flames CDs, and they’re right, insofar as metal today is fertile and popular enough that the law of averages tells us that there simply have to be a mammoth load of terrible bands; there are the exceptions, however, now as there were in the past, and the bands who have found their own sound and struck their own territory are the ones that will be remembered. I am glad that if they have not written their stellar debut again, Omnium Gatherum have neither grown complacent or dull. This is a record worth listening to.
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