Arson Cafe: Till - Monument to Man's Frailty Review

Sunday, November 06, 2022

Till - Monument to Man's Frailty Review

This band has been quite active since last year, with two albums then and several split releases in between them and their most recent, third full length, Monument to Man's Frailty. Apart from the neat title, it also features great artwork (John Constable's Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1823) and the same headstrong attitude as the last time you heard them. The production is dirty but not battered and the foundations of the record are clear, sticking to defending old school black metal by all means and above all, material of considerable capacity. When Monument to Man's Frailty initially kicks off, one might think that they're up for yet another raw-ish black metal band that relies on unsound and saturated black and white imaging for getting by. As the album unravels though, hints of compositional proficiency begin to arise, especially on how different parts of the tracks are melded together. Acoustic guitar passages are not just fillers, epic melodies come and go and the employment of background synths is excellent (just listen to the last track "Adrift to Winter's Embrace"). Till's skill was apparent with their earlier material as well and this one is no exception, yet not perfect either. I would have liked a bit more variety in the vocals, which come across as the typical second wave German / Finnish black metal norm of characteristic shrieking, and also some guitar riffs could sometimes lack identity, yet the overall work is concrete and palatable. I don't know what they ought to do differently in these two sections, after all it's that kind of black metal, and some moments are really compelling here, for example the striking "By Bayonet and Saber" or the beautiful folk-ish direction at the end of "Man's Greatest Tomb", and how it gives way to the more intense "Will to Decay". I will be digging the record more and more by time just because of how natural the flow feels, and it is surprising that Till have so much space for inspiration, especially considering how often they put out new material. [3.75/5 - Great]

2 comments:

InManusTuasNovember 6, 2022 at 1:08 PM
Awesome one, better than their debut
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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.