Exhumation — Seas of Eternal Silence (1997)

First things first, I owe a massive apology to former Exhumation and current Nightrage guitarist/bandleader Marios Iliopoulos. When I first heard Nightrage’s classic 2003 debut Sweet Vengeance my impression was that somebody had heard In Flames’ Clayman and decided they want to make an album just like it, at least from a production standpoint. It left the unflattering impression of a trend hopper. For one, that’s a deeply limited impression of Sweet Vengeance, (an album we will eventually discuss) largely based on the uniform production style of Studio Fredman and Fredrik Nordstrom. But the more important factor to consider is simply that Iliopoulos’ bands had been putting out their own thrash-infused takes on melodic death metal since as early as 1993, the year of DT’s Skydancer, with the Sensation of Deadness demo tape. Whether Iliopoulos had happened upon the concept of extreme metal aggression plus classic metal melody himself (very possible, it’s one of those ideas so good that somebody was going to have to do it eventually, much like nu-metal) or he was just extremely hip to what was going on in Swedish death metal in the 90s (undebatably true), what must be acknowledged is that Iliopoulos has been a warrior fighting for the cause of melodic death metal since its very earliest days, and he remains as such to this day, as is deeply evident on Nightrage’s most recent, quite excellent 2022 outing Abyss Rising, an album that maybe, just maybe this series will eventually review.

Which leads us to our subject today, Exhumation’s debut album and first of three total, 1997’s Seas of Eternal Silence. And man, what a record. I said in my last review about Sacrilege’s The Fifth Season that when I started this series I was hoping to find, for lack of a better term, lost classics, groups and albums that ended up sinking beneath the surface as the legends of At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity, and In Flames grew. Seas of Eternal Silence is one such album, and may have already broken The Fifth Season’s brief tenure as the best album by a band not in the “Gothenburg Three,” a masterpiece on every level except lyrical, hitting on everything from riffs to song structure to song sequencing to production and atmosphere.

I’ve said before that a lot of melodic death metal isn’t actually very “death metal” at all and ends up taking a form closer to detuned trad metal. In fact, that’s often what I like about it. Such is not the case with Seas of Eternal Silence, which is among the heaviest and most aggressive albums that we’ve covered on this series so far, featuring a rich contrasts of not only very aggressive death and thrash riffage with the Gothenburg twist, but also a number of incredibly powerful doom-ish sections that I’ll note as we go.

Aiding in that perception is definitely its recording quality. In a genre at this point already defined by the contributions of producer Fredrik Nordstrom and Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, a sound which was becoming increasingly clean and sharp, Seas of Eternal Silence brings us its track through the unmistakable sound of the Boss HM-2 and a decidedly more amateur mix where the bass guitar is not an instrument intended to be heard and the vocals and drums are, to put it diplomatically, competing with the guitars for attention at all time. In some cases this would be a negative but the guitar playing and riffcraft on this album, courtesy of the aforementioned Marios Iliopoulos and Panos Giatzoglou, is simply awesome.

However, the guitars are only one piece of the puzzle, as drummer Pantelis Athanasiadis sets a furious and consistent pace, and bassist/vocalist John Nokteridis provides a genuinely unique wail to this music that is best compared to contemporary Arch Enemy vocalist Johan Liva, but Nokteridis totally masters the style. As well, in spite of the level problems of the mix with the guitars being so oppressive and the drums and vocals being so relatively distant with the bass being a non-factor, the atmosphere of the album is truly excellent, especially when bits of dungeon-synth-y keyboard come in to provide texture. It really makes listening to the album a truly immersive and unique aesthetic experience.

A brief intro track shows us to the occasional bits of aforementioned dungeon synth that we’ll be hearing on this record, setting a somewhat dreamy atmosphere before tremolo picked guitars burn up the speakers to open the first actual song on the record, the title track, wherein the furious opening 1:45 are interrupted by a doomier bit of powerful lead guitar, not guitar soloing mind you (that comes later,) but just fantastic melody playing that then deepens as the two guitars play a melody together, then only one guitar plays the melody while the other gives chord backing and the drums still keep a high tempo, and then that all cuts down to an even slower vibe where the lead guitar is playing an even simpler melody while the drums cut to half time. After we get a variation on the opening riff concept leading back into the proceeding riffs from the faster sections and then the actual opening riff comes back before cutting back into the doomish part.

It’s a really strong structure where, without relying either on completely straightforward verse-chorus structure nor devolving into seemingly random “riff salad” as reader Leeroy Lewin describes it, you get to keep the excitement of introducing dynamic changes while earning those dynamic changes not just with fundamentally strong riffs, but by, essentially, building patterns, a concept that Exhumation execute to great effect all over this record. And while the song to this point has been pretty fantastic, we get the first really transcendent moment of the record when the previously introduced downtempo riffs give way to an absolutely gorgeous guitar solo, in more ways than one. Whereas the rhythm tracks are pretty obviously HM-2 pedals, I’m tempted to say though cannot declare definitively, that the lead tone is a more traditional Tube Screamer into tube head sound, but it’s fairly obvious at least to my ears that the lead guitars are a completely different tone, and the resulting layers are just really pleasing to hear, and this is to say nothing of the playing itself, courtesy of lead guitarist Iliopoulos who opens on some really smooth, beautiful melodies before shredding his way through some pentatonics and then closing on a few more held notes as the track comes to a close, fading out on some simple clean guitar arpeggios. A truly excellent leadoff track that had me hooked from the first time I heard this record and has yet to fade, even after hearing so, so many record in this style.

For as much praise as I lavished on that one, be prepared for more as regards perhaps the album highlight, track 2, “Dreamy Recollection.”

An Aside on Music Theory, If You’ll Indulge Me

Perhaps this should be its own article, but I’m going to take a moment to discuss a concept that I’ve always felt the reality of as a metal listener and guitarist but have never seen really codified. I think an easy name for it would be “lowest note/key primacy.” In heavy metal, it has long been accepted that lower means heavier, with the 80s being the last time that standard guitar tuning was widely used by most bands, followed by the 90’s where guitar tunings shifted radically downward in only a few years, seeing virtually every major subgenre adopt tunings at least one entire step below standard tuning as, well, the new standard, followed by the early 2000’s where Meshuggah’s pioneering work with 8 strings tuned basically in bass range (F standard, only a half step above a standard tuned bass) eventually lead the fans of their style to adopt even radically lower tunings, with even Ibanez now commercially producing nine-string guitars that produce notes usually produced on the lowest strings of five string bass.

One musical side-effect of this is that heavy metal bands will often either default to their lowest available key as a means of remaining as heavy as possible at all times (what I derisively refer to as Metallica Syndrome), or even bands that use a diversity of keys will intentionally use their lowest available key to host their most aggressive, or even downtune below their usual tuning to try and reach new depths of heaviness.

Another way to see this is that a heavy metal band is often, for lack of a better description, centralized around the lowest note of their guitar tuning. Seas of Eternal Silence shows this in spades as the band frequently modulates songs into D minor, the lowest available key in the tuning that the band uses for the whole album, D standard.

Another side effect of Lowest Key Primacy is that, as Exhumation does here, a band can use clever track sequencing to, in effect, fool the listener to create powerful effects upon the first listen of a record.

But I Digress . . .

“Dreamy Recollection” opens without a fixed key center, with two opening measures putting it in territory resembling F# Lydian before throwing in chords that make it resemble more the F# half-whole diminished scale, which are two very different harmonic landscapes. Compared to the opening title track it leaves the listener with their feet not on the ground, harmonically speaking, before it then rips into this riff at 0:44. (tempo approximated in transcription)

Now, if you’re looking at this on its own without having first heard the record and you know your guitar scales, it’s somewhat obvious where this is going, but to me it was not. Because the band had opened the record on the “Prime Low Key” of D minor and was now pumping away at a low D once again, my biases lead me to believe that they were playing in D, but in this case my brain was perceiving the first few measure of this as being D whole-half diminished scale (D, E, F, G, Ab, A#, B, C#), the whole-half scale being fairly common in extreme metal as the natural extension of a genre of music born out of the “evil” sound of the tritone, although if that were the case, the F# power chords near the end of the riff were throwing me for a loop. Perhaps they were just going for Slayer style nonsense notes?

And then it becomes clear. They weren’t using D diminished. They were playing B harmonic minor, which is not far off at all. (B, C#, D, E, F#, G, A#,) and they were doing it to set up a riff at 1:01 in B minor, one that ends up hitting you with such energy you’re left with no recourse but to bang your head and seek a brick wall to try and throw your body through. It is a powerful moment on a record full of them. And then as if to make my point about the primacy of the lowest available key, after this they switch to a slower riff in D minor to increase the punch of each individual power chord, a section that plays with time signatures a bit before the tempo increases and goes back to the previously transcribed B harmonic minor riff. This is easily the most “shocking” moment on the record, but it is by no means the record peaking. The rest of the album is filled with shockingly comparable moments of beauty and power.

I realize this has already gotten longwinded so I’ll talk about my other favorite songs on the record and then simply implore you to listen yourself. “Forgotten Days” opens at a doomy tempo before again a beautiful lead guitar melody over sustained power chords returns, giving that really sweeping feeling of power, not terribly long before speeding things up briefly before returning to the doom, this is actually fairly close in style and intention to death/doom at times, especially of the My Dying Bride type. The riff at 1:51 in particular has some absolutely crushing chords, and the song keeps up the vibe until 2:51 when Marios hits us with another just lovely solo, very bluesy in articulation and technique but still playing all of the notes of the minor scale rather than staying to pentatonic and creating the pretense of bluesiness rather than the genuine article. Later at 3:50 we get a disgusting thrash chug, and soon enough we’re circling back on previous ideas until we fork off to a different destination from one of those earlier ideas and landing on yet another absolutely soaring section of sustained power chords underneath particularly choice notes in a lead guitar melody.

Yet more of that style of arrangement is found in the last track I’ll choose to highlight (every track is pretty damn great), “Ceaseless Sorrow,” which as soon as the wonderfully moody intro is over cuts to a brief interlude of chuggy intervals until we get the best single series of ideas in a row on the record starting at 0:51, with one incredible lead melody followed by another for about a minute and a half before circling back to the first one, maintaining a largely doomy pace throughout before the record closes on the reliable one-two finale of one more ultra heavy piece (“Guilts of Innocence”) and a lovely instrumental track to close. (“Monuments”)

Conclusion: I could probably go in depth on all of the tracks here, or at least most of them, because this record is just amazing. In the last review I mentioned that the big reason I’m doing this project is to find the “forgotten greats,” as it were, records on the level of a Testament Practice What You Preach that for whatever reason never reached the the level of acclaim and celebration and canonization that their contemporaries reached. Even moreso than The Fifth Season, a record I absolutely adored, this is that record. In my estimation, this plays second fiddle only to the In Flames records we have covered so far, and only because the band lacks the lyrical vision that In Flames had. What they lack in vision they more than make up for in pure aesthetics: a crushing and dense atmosphere made dark and brooding with synth layers, songs that go on incredible journeys off tempo and key change without ever feeling forced, and beautiful guitar solos soaring over fiery downtuned metal. It is the definition of a forgotten classic record.

I really can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this record and how excited it made me to pursue the rest of this project. I’ve already sampled Exhumation’s next record, Dance Across the Past, and I can tell you pretty assuredly that that record is also excellent. Putting it simply, an absolute must-listen for fans of melodic death metal and its history. Seek this out now. Five stars, 10/10, two thumbs up, etc.

-Durante Pierpaoli, Lynnwood, WA, December 2022