pinkytheent
Inter Arma do it again. They have an uncanny ability to capture the feel of an era: Sulphur English felt like a prophecy of then, this feels like a prophecy of now. They have a totally idiosyncratic sound that is immediately identifiable while also always keeping you on the edge of your seat, breathless for what will come next. Totally hair raising and spine tingling. The raw emotion of the acoustic songs on their albums feels like an emotional culmination. Incredible work, fellow Virginians!
Favorite track: Forest Service Road Blues.
HerrHelmus
The opening track threw me off a bit, but holy cow, this is a ferocious beast of a record. This record has a little something for every Inter Arma (and extreme metal) fan.
Favorite track: Violet Seizures.
Cephalic Miasma
I was partially hoping the twisting dissonant tech-death-infused labyrinth that opens this album was an indicator of what followed. However, Inter Arma have never been about giving people what they want, they give us music that we need and I didn't know how much I needed the rest of this album. Really stellar stuff, as usual. Always compelling and truly unique - no other band sounds like this.
Favorite track: New Heaven.
New Heaven, INTER ARMA’s latest album, is a compelling testament to perseverance, top to bottom. Its thicket of ever-dense layers of doom, death, and black metal occasionally let bits of light slip in, fleeting reminders to keep going amid the tumult.
New Heaven marks a sharp turn for the band, showcasing some of the most extreme and angular songwriting INTER ARMA has ever laid bare. Known for their cinematic take on sludgy, extremely cavernous, and borderline psychedelic Metal, the Richmond band broadens their dynamics by seesawing between piledriving momentum and swirling oblivion. New Heaven crushers and conquers, and illustrates what INTER ARMA can truly be.
Take the title track, with its hair-raising lead riff stemming from drummer/songwriter TJ Childers’ challenge to himself to write a nonsensically dissonant part that he ended up loving. The song spirals upward into a punishing Death-Metal march, Meanwhile, vocalist Mike Paparo’s stentorian bellows the bludgeon, above an impossibly complicated web of riffs and rhythms. From the get go, New Heaven and the opening title track eschews any restraint - INTER ARMA is completely unchained.
Paparo’s keen and empathetic lyrics about innocent victims of war, addiction, and social apathy affirm that feeling, as a survivor grimaces at the carnage behind him and presses ahead best he can. “You stared into the brutish jaws of strife’s heartless device,” he growls into a chthonic blitz during “The Children the Bombs Overlooked,” a late-album powerhouse. “And you turned your back to hell.” That forward march out of madness is New Heaven in an armor-plated nutshell.
Though this is indeed another INTER ARMA triumph, it is not a triumphant album, meant to offer some glib or naïve assurance that everything will be fine.
What evidence is there for that, really, either on a record where friends are forced into submission, addiction, suicide, or retreat to a world where suffering remains the lingua franca? No, INTER ARMA and New Heaven are too realistic and experienced for that. This is, instead, a record about enduring brambles and curses and lasting long enough to make something profound, honest, and even affirming about it all every now and again—exactly as INTER ARMA has on New Heaven.
INTER ARMA's music resists generalization and categorization, but one thing that's consistently true, is that the VA quintet
possesses an unparalleled sense of scope. Few artists convey the complexity that INTER ARMA (Latin for "in times of war") does. The band creates terrible and often hauntingly beautiful portraits of humanity through music that is deeply organic yet still mystical and modern....more
