Earlier this year, I was standing inside a local bar/club discussing metal with a good friend of mine. From there these two near identical scenester fellows decided to quiz us on our metal tastes and a near multi-hour epic argument was launched on who was better, Judas Priest or Iron Maiden, and the two scenesters were also trying to convince us of the musical importance of Motley Crue and the more recent Hella. With the exception of some of the Judas Priest points they made, their music tastes sucked ass and we more or less wrote them off. However, before the night was over, the two signaled us down to their truck where the more annoying one demanded we listen to their buddy’s band. He insisted it sounded just like At the Gates (a band which is currently running through scenester vocabulary like fire, despite being long dead). He played it for us and surprisingly it wasn’t bad and was certainly better than The Black Dahlia Murder, but in the wake of Arsis it was nothing spectacular. That band was The Absence.

Since that fateful night, my buddy managed to attend not one but two shows with The Absence and picked up their self-titled EP. Upon returning from these shows, he raved about how good they were. I was rather incredulous, but fuck, this bastard is the most critical fucker I know; if he likes something then it has to be good. When Metal Blade finally released their debut album, I went in blind and bought the full length. Man, was I disappointed.

The Absence isn’t bad, not by a long shot. Their music is more or less an exact and faithful recreation of the typical Swedish melodic death metal that people went apeshit over in the late 90’s and early 2000’s; The Absence combines a vocal style similar to a more blackened Tomas Lindberg with musical writing that’s part At the Gates, part better Arch Enemy, part pre-Colony In Flames, and part Dark Tranquility on one of their better days. The musicianship is spot on, the sound is very faithful to the source material, and fuck, Erik Rutan gives the album a pretty decent production, too. So why is this so God damn underwhelming?

I’ll give them this: it’s not The Black Dahlia Murder. And thank god for that; The Black Dahlia Murder has proven twice-over that they don’t know how to handle ripping off At the Gates. The Absence at least sounds decent. The problem with The Absence is that they suffer the same problem as Nightrage: the album is just one big composition fallacy. Even if you get all the parts right, it doesn’t necessitate that the whole will be just as dead on as the sum total of the parts. Take a look at Nightrage- the band was a super group of sorts regarding the style and had everything individual part right, but the albums they put out were ultimately forgettable. The Absence suffers this same problem.

It also doesn’t help that the final song "Seven Demons" rips out with a highly metalcore-influenced structure. And I don’t mean Isle of Man-type metalcore either, I mean Trivium, et al-styled metalcore. If they’re going to throw in clean, melodic vocal choruses on their songs, I wouldn’t mind keeping to the Swedish death metal motif and ripping off Natural Born Chaos-era Soilwork, but taking several steps further and going into Swedish-influenced clichéd American metalcore territory (minus the breakdowns) isn’t helping their case. In their defense, it’s not as bad as Trivium, but it’s damn close. Why can’t people just model their metalcore off Cephalic Carnage’s "Dying Will Be the Death of Me?"

All in all, The Absence isn’t a bad band. From Your Grave is a lot better than anything coming out of Gothenburg right now and it easily eclipses the shit parading as melodic death metal that The Black Dahlia Murder has been spewing out, but in light of fellow American melodic death metallers Arsis, The Absence is going to have to try a lot harder. Right now they suffer from the same "sum of parts does not equal whole" problem that Nightrage has. They also need to drop that last song.

Written By: Necro-tron