Band:	The Mantle
Album:	Violent Cosmic Fortune
Style:	Progressive death metal
Release date:	August 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. Primordial Cauldron
02. Ignite The Celestial Furnace, O Astral Titans!
03. Shadow Of A Behemoth
04. Battle Of The Giants
05. Gravitational Harmony [feat. Mario Camarena & Esiah Camarena]
06. Planetary Accretion
07. From Dust Of Heavens Shattered
08. 500 Million Years Aflame
09. Beneath The Waves
10. That Which Moves Of Its Own Volition

For whatever reason, the cosmos and sci-fi concepts seem to be most frequently explored by death metal bands, specifically technical/progressive death metal ones, and the titles, artwork and musical contents of Violent Cosmic Fortune continue on this legacy.

In its first iteration, The Mantle was a solo instrumental metal project of Max Gorelick’s, with but a few guest features joining him on the 2017 self-titled debut. However, in the intervening years, not only has Gorelick added vocals to his repertoire, but he has expanded The Mantle into a full band via the addition of drummer Asher Bank and fellow vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Sky Moon Clark. While The Mantle was, like Violent Cosmic Fortune, a progressive metal album, the similarities largely end there, as the bright melodic focus of the debut has been replaced by a darker, more extreme and more varied approach on the band’s sophomore effort.

Eerie ambience during “Primordial Cauldron” sets an ominous cosmic tone for an album whose concept depicts the formation of the solar system and the emergence of life on Earth. As soon as it ends, the first riff of “Ignite The Celestial Furnace, O Astral Titans!” already reveals a less melodic guitar style, its discordance harking back instead more towards the sound of the pioneering early 90s tech-death bands such as Cynic and Atheist. This new-look iteration of The Mantle is one that, like fellow cosmic voyagers Obscura, straddles the line between progressive death and tech-death. There is plenty of impressive discordant technicality and oddball rhythmicity on Violent Cosmic Fortune, but there’s also a clearly progressive slant to the writing on the album’s multiple 10-minute tracks.

“Ignite The Celestial Furnace” is the first of these, and its steady pace during the first few minutes also exhibits the doomier inclinations of The Mantle; Violent Cosmic Fortune doesn’t plough forward relentlessly at breakneck speed in the way that acts such as Obscura, instead reminding me a bit more of Cave Bastard’s Wrath Of The Bastard in how it balances off-kilter dirges with the sections in which they do less loose with high-octane dizzying intensity. A consistently ear-catching feature across both slower and faster passages on this song is the lead guitar work, which can exhibit hints of melody in addition to full-speed pyrotechnics, but also is willing to weave in more jarring, chromatic sequences, as well as some more atmospheric soundscaping on top.

Following tracks further explore both the lower-tempo grimness and faster technicality; “Planetary Accretion” romps ahead with a quite classic 80s metal-inspired tone and style to its riffs, while “From Dust Of Heavens Shattered” progressively descends into bleak trudging across its runtime. “Shadow Of A Behemoth” is initially on the steadier end of the tempo spectrum, emphasizing groove in its somewhat janky riffs, but it is as this song progresses that another side of The Mantle reveals itself. As mentioned earlier, the debut was very much on the melodic end of the prog-metal spectrum, and while nothing on Violent Cosmic Fortune really approaches this, the extended clean guitar passage during the middle and much of the end of “Shadow Of The Behemoth” does reveal a more melodic edge to this album.

“Battle Of The Giants”, the album’s longest song, explores this further, first with some quite classic prog (think early Dream Theater) shred soloing, and later during recurring clean passages during the song’s second half. This track arguably does suffer a bit with momentum due to the ways in which it stops and starts, but the actual constituent components themselves do a solid job of balancing intensity, melody and atmosphere, rendering “Battle Of The Giants” one of the most memorable songs on the album. “Gravitational Harmony”, on which guitar siblings Mario and Esiah Camarena appear, is also memorable, or noteworthy at least, for being instrumental-only and placing a heavy emphasis on explorative clean guitar playing, with a bit of a jazzy edge to it.

As a substantial pivot towards a new sound in contrast to the debut, Violent Cosmic Fortune is a solid first attempt at an extreme technical metal album from Gorelick and co; it’s quite lengthy with a full-hour runtime, but the level of variety across the tracklist, including the pronounced doom emphasis across the trudging closer “That Which Moves Of Its Own Volition”, keeps the album sounding fairly fresh, and The Mantle do a good job of displaying strong technical skills without having to rely on them as a critical component of the album’s sound.