Frostbite Orckings may have claim to the most interesting premise in metal, at least in 2023. Based on recordings from hired session musicians,1 the project is a work of purely AI-generated power metal. The Orcish Eclipse is the project’s debut full-length release, and heralds itself as “the world’s first AI-generated heavy metal album.” For my part, I am resolved to not really care about that. I do not think AI in art is inherently a good or bad thing, nor do I believe that AI is incapable of creating something beautiful. So I will listen to the album in full, several times at least, and decide if I enjoy it based on the exact same factors as I have every other review I’ve ever written.
Unfortunately, my first listen through The Orcish Eclipse immediately challenged that resolution, because the album sounds so weird that you’re almost forced to remind yourself that most of its decisions weren’t made by humans. At first glance, it’s standard power metal, with chugging riffs and harsh vocals, and opener “When I Fall” sounds fairly straightforward. Then “Orcs Don’t Cry” opens with three seconds of synths before diving into a gritty riff that’s completely at odds with the song’s whimsical/nonsensical title and theme. It has one of the best choruses on the album, but the lyrics are so absurd that it’s hard to enjoy it. Then there’s “Beauty of the Night,” which opts to use a tremolo guitar that sounds so much like burbling2 I’m not fully convinced it’s really a guitar. This kind of thing keeps happening. Again and again, Frostbite Orckings makes bizarre, unexpected, off-putting choices that make it hard to ignore the fact that no humans were harmed in the making of this album.
The most unforgivable thing about The Orcish Eclipse, however, is its utter tepidity, its absolute lack of emotion, and its entirely unsuccessful attempts to make up for it. I have never listened to an album that made me feel nothing before this. It has all the right things in all the right places to emulate an energetic power metal experience—choral vocals layered over choruses, shouted ear-worm phrases, keyboard flourishes in all the right spots, all done with all the elegance of a paint-by-numbers kit. “Coming Home” is the worst offender, opening with robotic clean chanting (none of the clean singing on this album sounds natural) and replaying it every time the title phrase is shouted. It tries so hard to emulate folk metal, but it fails, because folk metal is sung and played with feeling. There’s a good song in there, but the actual performance does not live up.
An offshoot of this issue is the sterile songwriting and production choices that further rob the album of its energy. The drumming may as well have been done by MIDI for all the power it adds to the music, and the guitar chugs are little more than background noise. Meanwhile, the songs are predictable to a fault; each one ends on a chorus, sometimes modulated from the last one, and nearly every chorus ends with the name of the song. After a while, you get really good at predicting what’s going to happen next… until the curveball conclusion that is “Endless Love.” Here, we have a song that is so clearly AI-generated and so stylistically out-of-place from the rest of the album that it breaks through the tepidity of the whole in the worst way possible.
The Orcish Eclipse is fascinating. Played in the background, you wouldn’t notice anything odd about it. It hits all the right notes and emulates power metal well. The more you pay attention to it, the more you notice the cracks. You notice the basically-missing bass, the near-absent guitar leads,3 the weak drumming, and the fact that the lyrics rarely make any sense at all.4.= I believe that no one dreamed of making this album; it seems to exist only as an experiment, a premise, and for that, I am left extremely disappointed.
Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Metalverse5
Websites: frostbiteorckings.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/frostbiteorckings
Releases Worldwide: December 22nd, 2023
