Connect with The Arcane Order
Listen to The Arcane Order
It’s always great to see a band persevere over years and decades, weathering lineup changes and other hardships. While plenty of long-running acts have enjoyed stability and pumped out one album after another every few years, plenty more released promising material only to fade away for a number of years. Denmark’s The Arcane Order comes to mind for this reason, as their take on melodic death metal and thrashy death metal in 2006 and 2008 caught my attention and made them one of the more promising newer acts on Metal Blade’s roster at that time. After a seven-year gap they released their third album and then went silent again for nearly eight more, going through significant lineup changes in the process. But guitarists Flemming C. Lund and Kasper Kirkegaard have weathered the storm and assembled a new lineup, with this year’s Distortions from Cosmogony showcasing an increased scope and even more grandiose arrangements. It’s an ambitious undertaking that expands their core sound while still keeping the songwriting interesting, giving listeners plenty of high-flying melodies and harsher riffs to get lost in.
The Arcane Order’s earlier material like The Machinery of Oblivion and In the Wake of Oblivion struck a balance between Gothenburg melodic death metal and mid-2000s death/thrash, but with some progressive elements and songwriting that seemed oriented towards huge climaxes and a grander scale than some of their peers. Distortions from Cosmogony feels like a natural evolution of where the band has been heading since, bringing in some crushing death metal blasting, sweeping symphonic elements, and melodic riffs that still have some of that earlier melodeath sound. There’s even some black metal to the tonality and riff structure which I don’t remember quite as much of on the group’s prior work, and this makes for a more diverse sound. When it comes to the songwriting, sometimes The Arcane Order goes for more progressively oriented, sprawling arrangements that remind me a bit of earlier Opeth but with the production values and scale of more recent Keep of Kalessin. It works well, and naturally captures a lot of what fans of everything extreme metal are looking for. There’s plenty of blasting and faster paced riffs that knock you on your ass, but there are also passages that slow things down and give you a chance to get lost in the shimmering atmosphere. Tracks like “Starvations for Elysium” showcase the diversity that makes The Arcane Order exciting, starting off with a huge black metal type blasting passage that later transitions between some slower atmospheric grooves and thrashier riffs. Admittedly a few of the longer songs overstay their welcome, particularly the ones at the end like “Ideals of Wretched Kingdoms” and “Wings of Duality”. But this only dampens the impact slightly and I’ve still found myself having Distortions from Cosmogony on a steady rotation recently, which shows it has some genuine staying power.
One of the biggest lineup shifts for The Arcane Order is on the vocal front, as long-time singer Kasper Thomsen left the music industry entirely not long after 2015’s Cult of None. Blood Label’s Kenneth Klitte Jensen took over from 2016 to 2021, but also left, so Møl’s Kim Song Sternkopf is who would ultimately end up as the new vocalist. This is a pretty significant change for The Arcane Order, as Thomsen had a scream/growl that was more melodic death metal and thrash/groove metal oriented, sounding very close to what you’d expect from a lot of groups that emerged during the 2000s. In contrast, Sternkopf brings a more extreme metal focus, utilizing a death metal growl that’s very full and towers over the recording. But he shakes things up regularly, moving up to higher shrieks and throwing in some clean singing when it suits the writing. I like his low growls in particular, as they have this heft to them that reminds me of Vader or early Opeth and this fills out the sound significantly. Given the increased scale and grandiosity of the instrumentation, it makes sense that The Arcane Order would need a vocalist who can match that and Sternkopf appears to be the right man for the job.
The types of lengthy gaps The Arcane Order has had between their last two albums can be tough for a band to deal with, and when you add a significant band overhaul to that the odds certainly seem stacked against them. But they’ve returned stronger than ever, adding in some hints of black metal and keeping the progressive slant that makes for some songs that hook you from beginning to end. A few of the longest ones could’ve been trimmed just a bit, but that doesn’t prevent this album from really hitting the spot and delivering high flying and intense riffs that will keep listeners coming back for more. Distortions from Cosmogony is available from Black Lion Records.
-Review by Chris Dahlberg