Atheist - Unquestionable Presence: Live at Wacken (2009)

Unquestionable Presence: Live at Wacken is not only a reasonable account of Atheist in the flesh, but a catalyst to consolidate the band's return to the field after about 15-16 years of general silence. That a band so loaded with interesting ideas was cut well short of its time after but three studio albums (all in close succession) was a travesty. But here was a hint at last that they would return and rearm themselves. Unfortunately, the package is saddled with a second disc that is nothing more than a compilation of previously released material. A veritable waste of space. Atheist was and is a highly specialized act with an appeal to a niche of the death and progressive metal audience that already owns this stuff, so just about anything would have been better. How about tossing the Beyond demo on as the second disc? Or a few unreleased, rare odds and ends? Nah, let's just give the people what they want to hear: what they've already heard, unless they've been living under a rock for two decades, but possibly even then...

Well, the live disc at least is admirable, with a nice resonance from an appreciable audience from the Wacken Open Air 2006 festival. It offers a clean tone in the guitars, and a thick, oozing undercurrent courtesy of Tony Choy, and a clear glimpse at Steve Flynn's jazzy transgressions. Kelly Shaefer doesn't sound as if he'd skipped a beat in the intermittent silence of the band's career, and might even have ramped up his mayhem (which I can confirm, now having listened through the new studio album Jupiter from 2010). The eight tracks are culled exclusively from the band's classic Piece of Time (1989) and Unquestionable Presence (1992) albums. Though I mildly prefer the latter in its studio incarnation, I must admit that the oldies are the best of the litter here: "Unholy War" and "Piece of Time" sound particularly vital and fresh, trailed by "On They Slay". The track listing does favor the Presence material, though, and of these: "Mother Man" and the title track sound the best, followed by "Your Life's Retribution", "An Incarnation's Dream", "And the Psychic Saw".

The compilation is delivered in chronological succession, and unlike the live set, all three albums are represented. Interestingly enough, all four of the Unquestionable Presence tunes from the set were included. "Piece of Time" and "Unholy War" are joined by "I Deny" and "Room With a View" from the debut album; "Mineral", "Water" and "Air" are the proxies for the divisive Dimensions. I won't deny that these are mostly positive selections from the catalog, and yet I can't help but feel ripped off, once more, by a label exploiting the resurgence of interest in one of their 90s-heavy artists (Roadrunner was guilty of a bunch of these). Granted, Relapse was not the band's original imprint, so the tracks had not appeared through them, but I assert that a better bonus disc might have vastly increased the value of this release for the fanbase. For the live disc alone, it might be worth hearing once or twice, though nothing deviates from or really exceeds the earlier studio fare. But this glass is only half full, and if a second disc was to be included, it should have been more worthwhile.

Verdict: Indifference [5.5/10]

http://www.atheistmusic.com/

Atheist - Elements (1993)

Elements has often received a bit of slack from the metal press and audience due to its extreme bait-and-switch of genre classification. However, it doesn't exactly take the acuity of a trend forecaster to see that this was where Atheist was headed, was ALWAYS headed as they had woven the threads of both Piece of Time and its superior successor Unquestionable Presence. The 'elemental' concept behind its construction is perhaps not the most novel of ideas, even for the 90s, as it had been explored as far back as classical times, but for the progressive/death metal genre it was indeed something unexpected. What's more, the fact that this was practically a posthumous effort, used to fill out their Metal Blade contract, and still ends up at the very threshold of quality is nothing short of amusing.

Go into this with a few deflated expectations from their frenetic sophomore album, and a mind open to the outside influences the band are expanding upon, and you might come out slightly the richer for it. Elements has its share of non-metal diversions, manifest mainly through interludes like the jazzy bounce of "Samba Briza", ambient guitar wailing of "Displacement" and "Fractal", or the subtle, stream-like clean tones of "See You Again". These are all quite brief, and though they do fill up a third of the track list, the remaining eight integrate Atheist's signature schizoid metallic components, albeit with a palette even wider than Unquestionable Presence. I found it curious that the band included not only a representation of "Fire", "Earth", "Air" and "Water", but also tracks devoted to another classical trilogy of elements "Animal", "Mineral" and plant ("Green"), with the title track finale serving as a curious congruence of all the above.

My biggest gripe with the album is that I didn't always feel the music itself was used as an apt aural metaphor for its corresponding substance. For example, "Green" lurches about like some stilted and confused behemoth, but other than perhaps a fantastic mental image of a walking or series of falling trees, I couldn't feel how it related. Same with "Water". I could see how the thick, popping bass-lines and swirling vortex might represent some maelstrom or whirlpool, but it did not seem to offer much submersion into this important element. "Air" is a bit more successful, despite the choppiness of its pacing, the calmer intro and ensuing structure did feel redolent of shifting jet streams or whorls of force. "Animal" becomes the most experimental as far as its architecture, with clinical, technical guitar lines woven below Shaefer's resonant tribal chaos, but "Mineral" felt a measure too playful to match its subterranean implications.

The remaining elemental representations are pretty good though, almost as if the album was intentionally back-loaded with quality. The swaying, searing "Fire' is the best single piece on the album, cast in a flux of ember-like jazzy passages and stoking furnace fusion. "Earth" rampages about with a steady, tectonic sureness but also deviates into sprightly, manic rhythms like banks of sharp crystals; and "Elements" justifies its nearly six minute length with some fascinating notation. The mix of the album is not one of its fortes, as Schaefer often feels too clanging and metallic even in elements where that style doesn't suit the atmosphere, but then, those atmospheres never feel 100% accurate to their adopted matter to begin with. Having three guitarists for this (they added Frank Emmi to the lineup) doesn't make much of a difference.

You'll never get that same, bewildered impression that Unquestionable Presence leaves you with, however I would not consider that a negative: a smoother, subtler companion was exactly what I would have wished for, and even though Elements is the band's worst overall full-length, and the band's heart was perhaps not fully involved, there are still just enough ideas to pick through to recommend at least a few listens.

Verdict: Win [7/10] (sharing forces for the living)

http://www.atheistmusic.com/

Atheist - Unquestionable Presence (1991)

What is it about bass players and touring bus accidents? In the 80s, we had Cliff Burton whisked away from us before he had arguably reached his prime. Shortly after the dawn of the following decade, it was Roger Patterson of Atheist, whose technical grandeur and potential was admittedly limitless. It's tragic, really. Patterson got so far as to be involved in the writing and pre-production records of the band's second full-length Unquestionable Presence, but the talented merc Tony Choy (Pestilence, Cynic) was brought in to waltz about the final product. It was a sensible choice, Choy was certainly up to the task, and in a strange twist of bitter irony, Atheist had created what I must say is their best album to date, though most of them are comparable in overall quality.

Here, the band had dialed up its jazz and groove elements to bolder extremes than the debut Piece of Time, and also come up with some far more catchy guitar lines in general. You still get the feeling that you're being jerked around through the A.D.D. compositional technique that the band is known for employing. Very often some superb riffing melodies will emerge and then vanish all too quickly, tantamount to the listener's frustration. Like Piece of Time, it seems as if the band are forcing such collisions, tripping over themselves to impress the audience by how quickly they can cycle through material. A tactic which has been used countless times since Atheist, by a myriad of technical death and thrash artists trying to outgun one another in both proficiency and brutality, and perhaps this band's greatest (and most unfortunate) influence upon the genre they matured through. However, this considered, Unquestionable Presence is still an impressive album with a wealth of acrobatic gallantry persisting through each track.

"Mother Man" wastes no time indoctrinating the listener with the band's increased curvy jazz aesthetics, Choy plucking through a dazzling rhythmic flume whilst the schizoid death/thrashing commences through spikes of precision violence and Shaefer's barking snarls. As with much of the album, you've gotta listen closely to the subtext, and by this I mean the bass, it will twist your mind straight off your spine, though some might not welcome the inherent funkiness. The title track is slightly less bewildering, but more impressive as a song, with a spacey clean fusion intro marred by squelching bass and then a jamming whirlwind sans vocals, but I really love the graceful arching of the guitars behind the verse at about 1:00. "Retribution" sounds like it might have belonged on Death's Human, only far more memorable, spastic and fluid. I was a little taken aback by the teensy chugged intro to "Enthralled in Essence", but then the band almost instantly turns towards an epic melody and a convocation of desperate, shifting speeds.

At this point, the band were probably well aware that the listeners' eyes were spinning in their sockets as if they were living slot machines, so we're given about a moment of tranquility at the opening of "An Incarnation's Dream": clean guitar passage akin to something Fates Warning might have pulled around this time, and then a thick, rhythmic implosion, as if some cosmic gate had opened above a peaceful, natural scene on some unexplored planet. This track is a curious one, with a strange swerve towards funky bass, shredded solo and chugging miasma, ultimately one of the least impressive on the album, but not uninteresting. "The Formative Years" goes for a more direct, charging thrash sequence before it morphs into unhinged jazz/death oblivion, a hyperactive string of hammers that play upon your mind like piano keys. "Brains", however, is one of my favorite individual songs here, with its frenetic strains of delicate, domineering tech death that we've since heard from countless younger bands possibly one unaware that it had already been done in 1991; "And the Psychic Saw" is a wonderful closer, another favorite and I just love the glorious desperation and rapid melodic mutes beneath the first verse.

For all the shit we give Scott Burns for much of his lackluster, samey sounding productions, one must admit that he achieved his success through a number of quality recordings. In my humble opinion, this is one of his best. The guitars are clean catapults of spatial expression. The bass is omnipresent, like standing in rush hour traffic without the big city slowdown. Steve Flynn is a titan behind the kit, and Shaefer sounds great, never mixed in too loudly against the musical backdrop. Unquestionable Presence naturally deviates away from the subterranean, occult and gore soaked indulgences that the more orthodox death metal bands would pursue, asking the broader questions about life and our place within the universe. 1991 was the year that the death genre would first begin to truly explore its progressive possibilities, with Pestilence and Death also unveiling their evolutions, and while I don't enjoy the Atheist contribution quite so much as the less frantic Testimony for the Ancients, it's certainly close in quality. Occasionally too frantic for its own good, and falling shy of perfection, but this is unquestionably worth owning.

Verdict: Win [8.5/10] (and deeper and deeper we fall)

http://www.atheistmusic.com/

Atheist - Piece of Time (1989)

It's no secret that death metal was largely a mutation of the thrash genre, but some bands held on more closely to the tenets of that precursor than others. This was as obvious in the Florida scene as anywhere else; bands like Atheist, Hellwitch and Morbid Angel clung heavily to the vicious speed and excitement of the Bay Area, but cranked those elements out to the nether reaches, simultaneously adapting the vocals into a more brutal and caustic resin. Piece of Time is without a doubt an impressive debut effort thanks largely to the monstrous rhythm section of Roger Patterson and Steve Flynn, far more intensely driven than what peers like Death or Obituary were churning forth; but I should also note that Kelly Shaefer's labyrinthine, psychotic vocals were something new as well, a less guttural application than Tardy or Schuldiner, but fully demented in their own right.

We were also experiencing one of the earliest inclusions of a heavy jazz influence to the metal milieu here, though it's not nearly so prominent as that found on the following albums. Within Piece of Time, it's manifest in the rhythm section swerves and shifts beneath the storm of hectic guitar patterns, but at the same time, it's also responsible for my biggest frustration with the album: that the band are producing such an oiled sequence of riffing overload that the tracks often feel like little more than manic waves collapsing into one another. Dissected, almost every guitar line on the album provides well plotted mayhem, but once affixed to one another they seem to go more for business than effectiveness. I also don't care much for the leads, they are wild and often uncouth transgressions which seem to benefit neither from catchy flickerings nor the wild excess that bands like Slayer and Pestilence put on the map. Piece of Time is a bewildering act of sharpened lunacy, and remains one of the best Atheist records, but it's not exactly perfect.

I do enjoy the synthesized intros to "Piece of Time" and especially "No Truth", the tracks which bookend the debut and are coincidentally among my favorites. The former is alleviated by the thick presence of Patterson's wandering bass-lines, soon joined by the frenetic and choppy, tech thrashing spasms and Shaefer's mad scientist ministrations. The latter is characterized with some wonderful melodic spikes (around 1:30) that hammer off against the punctual rhythms and the start/stop of its ghastly moshing violations. Otherwise, I really enjoy "Room With a View" for the balance of eerie, descending patterns and plunking bass explorations; "Beyond" for its flagrant force and bouncing vocal patterns that cede to screams; and "I Deny" with its swaying balance of confrontational, bludgeoning rhythms and mind teasing aesthetics. But even these have a few moments in which the tides seem to break against one another as if they were pieces being forcefully jabbed into the wrong place on the puzzle. Others like "On They Slay, "Life" and "Why Bother?" are equally head spinning, perhaps, but not so memorable.

If Piece of Time is most important for one thing, its the potential it showed for the death/thrash metal crossroads to explore new heights of frenzy, new spastic reaches of velocity. Surely we had a number of technical thrash bands like Coroner, Watchtower and Deathrow delivering masterful mergers of memorable songwriting and stunning proficiency, but Atheist set out to prove that these standards could be taken to the next extreme, the unfolding frontier that was death metal. It also largely eschews the horror/gore lyrics of other Florida death acts for a more serious examination of social and temporal constructs. I don't love all the songs here, and I don't love the production, which in my opinion lacks some depth that would have better delivered the considerable chains of notation, but its a punishing postcard from the asylum nonetheless.

Verdict: Win [8/10] (your soul is young)

http://www.atheistmusic.com/

Atheist - Jupiter (2010)

I was a firm enough follower of Atheist for their first few albums, the vicious Piece of Time and the more interesting sophomore Unquestionable Presence, but I've never attributed the same level of praise upon them that others have so insisted upon. They were a potent, competent contribution to a generational genre clash that unfortunately would not bear enough fruit, plagued with the early death of profound bassist Roger Patterson and then the uneven train wreck of 1993 known as Elements. I never found their schizoid flights of unrest quite as compelling as the Cynic debut Focus, or the early 90s efforts by Holland's mighty Pestilence, but they had their place, and like those acts, they have been reborn to a new century with an impeccably crafted comeback album.

Jupiter will have its naysayers, of course, void-like murmurs and mouth breathers that will naturally reject the band's course despite the fact that it retains surprisingly loyal to their earlier trajectory. But had the tables been turned, this album arriving as their third in the mid 90s, it would likely be heralded as a classic for all time. It's amazingly acrobatic and aggressive at the same time, and unlike the diminishing hipness of a Dillinger Escape Plan, it somehow evades the blinding din of technicality over structure. Each track is a fascinating experiment in twisting thrash/death psychosis that bleeds ambition, breeds intuition, and never once insults the eager audience. Kelly Shaefer's at his arguable best, creating a gnarled dementia through his strangely offsetting nasal barks, and the three guitarists (Shaefer himself, and Jonathan Thompson and Chris Baker of Gnostic) explode with ideas. Thompson is also an adequate bassist, covering for the band's alumni Patterson and Tony Choy, and Steve Flynn returns to the drum position he left after the second album.

We should also extend some credit to Jason Suecof, who to this point has engineered a slew of over hyped albums that bounced between technical death metal and the trendier metalcore climes. Jupiter is by far his best and most important contribution to date, and through his own technical death background, he really knows how to capture the band's spastic fretting and the 'bounce' of the jazzy, fusion-based rhythmic fundamentals. "Fictitious Glide" and "Fraudulent Cloth" are two of my favorites here, with enough frenetic mass to keep me enthralled through many repeated listens, incorporating the precise, clinical surgery so inclement to the success of this style, manifest through paranoid patterns and looping labyrinths of miasma. Then exists the more atmospheric dementia of a "Live and Live Again", or the thrusting discord of "When the Beast", or the writhing narcotic death of "Tortoise the Titan".

This has been a crazy few years for bands returning from a career coma with renewed ambition, and like most, Atheist seem sincere in a desire to get 'back on track'. Had bands like this persisted through the dead spot of the 90s, who knows what the form might have evolved into this past decade, but sometimes you've gotta stretch your wings before you can fly again. Jupiter is not perfect; in my opinion, no Atheist record ever has been, but it's a tight and terrifying experience which retains its luster even after the initial shock of the band's stylistic flexing wears down into their rapt attention to atmosphere and nuance, and this is arguably their most devious and delicious child of love and hate to date.

Verdict: Win [8.25/10]

http://www.atheistmusic.com/