Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! I've never featured a split record on here before, but thee's a first time for everything! Plus this split flows like a cohesive record… you'll see a minute or so. Anyway, you know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down awesome artists on Bandcamp that have their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I've been saying, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
So let's get our epic doom on with both Amiensus and Oak Pantheon!
The Basic Idea
It's simple- for the next sixteen minutes you're going on a journey with two distinct sides that work together in beautiful harmony to create a listening experience unlike any other. You'll climb endless to the peak of a mountain, you'll enjoy the beautiful sites… and you'll commit suicide right off the top. Got it? Good.
Why I Love It
First up we have Amiensus' song "Arise," which is everything I ever wanted out of melodic death metal and doom. The first thing that comes to mind when I heard it was if Opeth and Woods of Ypres had gotten together as a cohesive until when they were able to and wrote a song. The uplifting parts of the song absolutely soar, the vocal harmonies breathe life into death-riddled guitars, the instrumentation varies and overall my interest was unwaveringly involved in this song for the entire ten-minutes. The song climbs and climbs to the peak of the musical mountain, where…
Oak Pantheon, bitch! Oak Pantheon pick up right where Amiensus left off at the top and barrel at an astonishing speed right down the other side of the mountain. Double bass drum galore, fast riffs left and right and everything only seems to get more and more intense as you quickly head for whatever lies below. Then, right at the end… death? It certainly sounds like it. A gigantic guitar part takes over with harmonies everywhere, the drums hit a few more times and everything quickly fades.
Amiensus and Oak Pantheon got together and wrote the record no other band could as a single unit. Bravo.
