Emerging from the primordial sludge of Los Angeles, Arch Blade brandishes a sound that harks back to the salad days of classic metal, blending the spirit of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with streaks of thrash metal’s intensity. Kill the Witch is their debut release, featuring an ensemble cast of father/son co-founders, a Ukrainian vocalist, and the powerful beats of an ex-Dark Angel drummer. It draws conceptual inspiration from the dreams of their vocalist, but is the music dreamy or nightmarish?
Arch Blade whirl around a throwback metal core which principally ties influences from the NWoBHM and thrash metal scenes. The opening tracks adopt a raucous, rabble-rousing style and evoke a heavier Judas Priest. Their heaviness is achieved in no small part due to the rough-and-ready production. The overall package sounds unusually lo-fi for a sub-genre typically marked by its clean aesthetic. The guitar tone is distinctively down-tuned and the drums have a wild feel. Sadly I don’t love the tonal choices as the guitars sound – for lack of a better word – artificial, the snare is boxy and the hi-hats are piercing. It’s not common that I ask for a cleaner guitar tone but here the heaviness doesn’t justify a tone that rubs me the wrong way. Agreeable production generally goes unnoticed because it complements the music, but disagreeable production distracts from the music it wraps around. Kill the Witch has more of the latter.
More than their peers, Arch Blade incorporate a variety of influences in what initially appears to be something quite typical. While “Abduction” and “Nightbreed” accelerate into classic metal, “Tyrant Rhapsody” opens a middle chunk of the record demarcated by difference. This one is a starkly thrashy track, with riffs and production which are heavier than elsewhere. “Kill the Witch” has a groovy swagger and tough guy attitude that wouldn’t be out of place on a Pantera record, while “Factory of Sin” has a staccato, looping rhythm that feels more nu-metal than anything else. Last in this weird stretch is “House of Dreams” which offers the record’s obligatory (but decent) ballad, slowing things down and hamming up the melodrama. But overall I’m left sensing inconsistent songwriting rather than exciting creativity, undoubtedly exacerbated by production which spikes with the motley song-writing. For example, the title track features a different guitar tone and doesn’t layer its vocals in the same way. This results in a record that feels more amateurish than charming in its half-baked style.
Worse is that when you’ve penetrated the sometimes-surprising songwriting and acclimatized to the sometimes-rough production, the resulting music is just okay. When assessing my overall emotive response to Kill the Witch I land on words like “okay” and “forgettable” rather than “fun” or “exciting”. This worsens as the album progresses because the songs on the back half of this record are consistently 1-2 minutes longer than those on the front half, without being any better or more experimental. By the 6-minute closer called “Queen of the Damned,” the record has little more to say. Finally, while the riffs are generally respectable, the vocal melodies are buried on a number of tracks beneath an effort to inject a sneering style. The aforementioned tough guy attitude is much worse than the few moments where the vocalist actually sings. “House of Dreams,” being the ballad, naturally features a softer approach and therefore offers by far the best vocals on the record. They appear distressingly infrequently.
It’s a strong marker of a sub-par album that my favorite song is the ballad. I’m a sucker for ballads but if the remainder can’t match this then it can’t be better than average. Arch Blade aren’t a terrible band and Kill the Witch isn’t a terrible album, but I struggle to conjure anything I particularly enjoyed or appreciated about their core music. Even those that particularly enjoy metal that straddles the heavy/thrash line will just find haphazard songwriting wrapped in haphazard production. Arch Blade aren’t short of ideas but this isn’t the slick album they targeted.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps mp3
Label: Rockshots Records
Websites: archblade.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/archblade
Releases Worldwide: July 28th, 2023
