Hello and welcome back to the Bandcamp Buried Treasure article series, where I'll be hunting down Buy It Now/Free Download-payment option albums on Bandcamp by the best bands you've never heard! The goal is to introduce you 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, all while keeping your cost (potentially) down! This week we'll be listening to Boston, MA's technical death metal monsters, Replacire!
Replacire's The Human Burden is what would have happened if Chuck Schuldiner were still alive today and mixed up with the likes of Obscura and Opeth at the same time. It's enjoyable technical metal that skips over all the flashy showmanship and dives gracefully into the otherwise murky waters of the modern progressive metal scene. In short, if you want everything you like about popular bands jammed into one 41-minute masterpiece, then you're in the right place.
Right from the get go "Mask of Weary Eyes," you're immersed in a ridiculous tech-fest that keeps up just long enough to make the following, slower riffs sounds that much heavier. The classic death metal feel keeps up for about two and a half minutes until… a wiry web of tapped clean guitars and clean vocals that could've been on an Extol album. The feel of the song shifts one more time into a much slower section that puts what a lot of classic death metal revivalists are trying to accomplish to shame, and then switches back to a variation of post-intro section before calling it quits. Now take everything you've just read about the song and multiply it by eight; every single track is this majestically confusing. Yet, amidst the confusion is structure and a blatant knowledge of how to compose a song that has plenty of twists and turns without getting boring or grueling for the listen.
Two songs that stand out to me through the whole listen every single time are "Corridors of Resolution" and "Slow Cuts Inside A Throat." The former utilizes a pretty hefty amount of haunting clean vocal lines over finger-breaking riffs that sound like Mikael Åkerfeldt took the Heritage album and tried to craft an older The Faceless tune from it, while the latter is just an entirely new level of insane. Like, "Satan is holding a circus and only the most mental of the demons are invited"-kind of insane.
So with all the talks of sound shifts, demon-grade insanity and band comparisons, the bottom line is simply this; there will be an empty pedastal in your music collection if you don't own this record. It's a modern death metal masterpiece because it's not trying to be that. Instead, it's a blend of interesting sounds and vocals that manage to be heavy… by not trying so damn hard to be heavy. I'll give these guys another year tops before they're a big, big deal.
