The Eternal Reign

Born of Osiris

I'm not all that privy when it comes to technical death metal. Frankly, I'm not all that privy to Born of Osiris. All I can say is that when I heard a classmate play a cut from The New Reign during one of my high school guitar classes, I immediately gravitated to it. I loved how spontaneous it was; moving swiftly from passage to passage without ever looking back. To add to that, it was a total guitar record. Every moment, whether it be a rhythmically complex breakdown, crushing beat down riff, a melodic passage with a medieval flair, or the more flashy shred passages and crazy squeals, it pretty much all hits. Now with this mini-album being the band's first release on Sumerian, the production was not the cleanest, mainly in the drum and vocal area. The drums sounded incredibly fake, every drum hit sounding completely identical in tone and volume. On top of that, the kick drum sounded awful and if I recall, it sat way too high in the mix; completely consuming the track during blast beats or other moments with relentless bass drum action. As for the vocals, Ronnie Canizaro's deep growls sounded quite boxed in and didn't really fit in the mix. Regardless, I still loved this record and continued to revisit for years to come.

Luckily for me, the band celebrated the ten year anniversary of The New Reign by re-recording the whole thing. The band stayed so incredibly faithful to the original, but addressed some of the production issues that I nitpicked about earlier. The drums, despite still being heavily processed, sound so much better and the mix is way more appropriate. The improvements vocal wise could be a result of better production and mixing as well, but I wouldn't discount a possible improvement in Canizaro's technique in the ten years since. The tone is very much the same, but his vocals have a much clearer definition instead of just sounding like voice distortion and there's also some subtle inflection differences that keep his vocals from sounding as monotonous as it did at points on the previous recording.

As for why I really love this record, you can look to songs like Empires Erased; an ever evolving track that alternates between very melodic passages and crazy beat down riffs, each one different from the last. It is also one of the most spontaneous tracks on the record especially with the oddly placed harmonic climb at the very beginning and a random bar of guitar that bridges two sections together. On a record that slaps from front to back, Abstract Art and The New Reign still manages to tower over the rest. The former has an incredible breakdown at the end which features a great synth pad layered in the back and these melodic shots of guitar between the heavy chugging. This section also features the only real change from the original as guitarist Lee McKinney includes a pretty tasteful solo that soars over all of this heaviness. As for the latter, it is one of the most insane and dizzying guitar displays on the record. It is totally relentless from start to finish. Tagged on at the very end is Glorious Day, a track that did not originally appear on The New Reign, but the song does date back to around this time in the band's career (a rough demo version appeared on a 2004 EP). It's inclusion here is very welcome, especially with the crazy bass and drum intro, the incredibly epic guitar melody in the section about half way through, and some of the vocal stuttering effects - which in most cases don't go over too well - are actually pretty awesome.

I know so little about deathcore that I imagine it would puzzle hardcore fans of the genre as to why this record, of all records, is the one I somehow gravitated to. It's not even like I can explain why either, seeing as I have no other band to compare to. Again, all I can say is that these songs push all the right buttons for me. It is technical, but not overly so that it feels impenetrable. It is spontaneous and rarely, if ever, has a dull moment. I honestly cannot say enough nice things about it.