2022
Florida's metallic sludge unit Ether Coven have never been afraid to carve their own path. Featuring Peter Kowalsky, known for his fierce vocal performances in bands Remembering Never, Until The End and XBishopX, Ether Coven has always explored the more metal side of his love for extreme music, while still retaining the vicious metallic bite of previous bands. Their 2020 full length "Everything is Temporary Except Suffering" was as bleak and harrowing as the title suggested, pushing the band into further sonic experimentation with heavy leaning heavily into doom metal and shades of goth metal titans Type O Negative on the lengthier songs coupled with shorter blasts of metallic fury. They followed that release with "Language Is The Instrument of the Empire" with three songs that meshed all the different aspects of their sound into a formidable force and showcased the band's continued progression and growth. I'm happy to say that "The Relationship Between The Hammer and the Nail" is again a step up for the band and a continuation of this growth, pushing everything that makes this band a unique entity in extreme music further and culminating in what's easily their best material to date.
Opening with the insanely heavy "Psalm of Cancer" which along with much of the album lyrically touches on the battle with cancer that Kowalsky himself has been facing for several years, it's clear the band is intent on making their mark on extreme music known. Vocally, shades of Kowalsky's later work in bands like Remembering Never can be heard, but there is a heaviness both musically and lyrically that reaches far deeper into the darkness than those previous bands did. The first track's blistering pace seamlessly flows into the next song "Afraid & Suffering", an epic 10 minute dirge that's both crushingly heavy and hauntingly atmospheric and beautiful at times. This switch from song to song continues throughout the albums 7 songs, and rather than the combination of the shorter more fast paced metallic hardcore songs and the slower paced doom metal material feeling disjointed, everything impressively comes together in a way where it never feels like anything on the album is an outlier. Everything has it's place and lifts the album into it's own vibe and headspace, with a cohesion that can be hard to find with bands that so freely move between different genres.
The collaborative efforts on this album are also notable, with contributions from genre legends such as Dwid Hellion of Integrity, Dan Weyandt of Zao and Howard Jones of Blood Has Been Shed and Killswitch Engage, as well as Tarek Ahmed from unhinged and rising noise rock band Intercourse. Every vocalist contributes their own unique presence to their featured song, and it's clear that these features were well thought out with said vocalists in mind. It's exciting to see such well thought collaborative efforts put into motion as opposed to another artist being featured on a song for the sake of it, and brings to mind Converge's Axe To Fall in how well every feature has been executed.
With their new album, Ether Coven continue to prove they are an absolute force of a nature and one of the hardest hitting bands in extreme music currently. Anyone who's a fan of the darker side of hardcore and metal music owes themselves a listen to this record, and it's sure to be a memorable standout in a year that's already been huge for releases in the genre.
Purchase "The Relationship Between The Hammer and the Nail" from Good Fight Music
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