If the band name “Altars” doesn’t sound familiar to you, it’s not just because they’re far from the only metal band with that name, but also because they had a fairly short tenure, putting out a demo, a couple of splits, and their 2013 debut album, Paramnesia, before calling it quits in 2016. If that was the end of the story, it would be an album with a pretty good reputation in the underground, though it’s still not something you’d call a “cult classic.” In 2021, the band was revived with a significant change: bassist and vocalist Cale Schmidt was replaced by bassist and vocalist Brendan Sloan of Convulsing.
That move has obviously added Convulsing as a strong name reference for the sound of this album, adding a blackened death tone to the band’s sound of Morbid Angel, Gorguts, Immolation, and Portal, without necessarily turning it into blackened death. Existing within this scene obviously requires a lot of names, but the trick with the altars is not to be too dissonant or too technical, though they are more dissonant than technical. By a fairly significant margin.
It’s not that Ascetic Meditation is a simple or repetitive album, as there’s a lot going on, but when a lot of people see technicality as an impediment to writing memorable songs, putting less emphasis on it without feeling as memorable is rather odd. It’s not that it lacks dynamics, especially due to the injections of doom that accompany the slower sections, which combine with the atmospheric emphasis to create a sound that generates a sense of unease. And within a scene that thrives on dissonance, that sense of unease makes it feel more purposeful alongside more straightforward songwriting.
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