Band:	Cauldron
Album:	New Gods
Style:	Heavy metal
Release date:	September 07, 2018
Guest review by:	Ansercanagicus

01. Prisoner Of The Past
02. Letting Go
03. No Longer
04. Save The Truth / Syracuse
05. Never Be Found
06. Drown
07. Together As None
08. Isolation
09. Last Request

Previous records from Cauldron showed a band trying to stick to a "good old" production, keeping the guitars in the back, writing very riff-driven songs, with quite a doomy atmosphere. Choruses always had great melodies, making the band totally worth your while. It was nice, but also a bit weak in the same time. With this album, a couple of flaws have been tackled.

Primarily the vocals. The singing is more in tune, the different layers work together with depth instead of overlapping grossly, and the reverb is managed with more dexterity. Also the whole singing is integrated in the mix better, while it tended to sound aside from the rest of the music. The band always had killer riffs in C tuning, but sometimes they would get repetitive, or they wouldn't be used to their full potential. I guess this is very subjective, but this album gets me hooked from start to finish, without any sensation of length. Concerning the lyrics, as always, they are not very thoughtful and made out of easy rhymes, but they help the band's imagery with themes like fate, sorrow, failure, delusion, pessimism etc... Anyway they're cool to sing along, and the melodies are totally compelling

What's really making the album stand out is the addition of arpeggios to the riffing, allowing further work with the texture and atmosphere of the record. Most of the songs incorporate clusters of notes at some point, working harmonically rather than melodically. The band almost exclusively uses the eolian and phrygian scales, and keep switching between the two, which give their albums this special "dark" sound. Of course it's nothing too technical, but it's nice to see a plain heavy metal band fully using modes to give their music such colors.

The drums are bound to a strong 4/4 beat, at mid-tempo, and are not used for anything slower or faster (except "Drown" and "Together As None"). Maybe that's why the album is so solid, it doesn't try to coin too much variation and hence works as the development of one single idea over 41min. After the first arc of 6 straightforward songs, comes "Together As None", quite unexpectedly a glam song. The singing is a bit different on it, and the riff screams Ratt or Dokken. It may be upsetting, but it works, since all the other pillar elements of the record are still here. The next piece is instrumental, and bereft of drums, still with the same purpose of creating anticipation for "Last Request", which mood is the same as the first 6 songs, but concludes it nicely with its hypnotic riff.

Cauldron may very well not be groundbreaking, but at least New Gods is a great and refreshing record, when taken in comparison the flock of generic over-compressed 'in your face'/'die for metal' heavy metal bands of this modern era. It has a different savour, I'd wish to hear more often.