Skeletal Remains Fragments Of The Ageless

I won’t lie, I went into this review with lower expectations, ready to be a hater because, as I’ve said before, I’m just not feeling straightforward death metal much these days. But when an album is good, it’s good, and I probably shouldn’t have doubted Skeletal Remains in the first place as they’ve been a remarkably solid band in this vein for years. Silly me. So, as always, I will put the journalistic integrity of both myself and Lambgoat on my back and deliver a truthful, impartial review… mostly.

There’s a lot going on with Fragments Of The Ageless. From the first burning seconds of “Relentless Appetite”, its impression is keenly felt: you will get your shit ripped and torn like a botched circumcision. But it’s not just chaos for chaos’ sake - solid writing and execution laces each song and every one has at least one (1) riff or passage that’s worthy of a facial contortion or a rhythmic head nod, even if it does ride the rails of death metal’s time-worn traditions pretty hard.

One of the best songs the album has to offer is “Forever in Sufferance” which has a slight thrashy affectation, marked by speed and agile-ass guitars. The bellowed vocals are quintessential death metal - just on that line of being lyrically indiscernible, but you also don’t really care because they sound good. Honestly, they remind me a bit of Nergal’s vocals around Behemoth’s Demigod era. That said, the lyrics are worth musing over as they deal with the torment of intrusive thoughts, failure, and suicide, profoundly dark themes that certainly help color in Skeletal Remains’ music with some drops of bloody reality.

On the opposite side of that are songs like “Verminous Embodiment” with its weighty take on death metal extremes. Slamming punk-influenced drums embellish the track, but it also has some caveman murder grooviness to it elsewhere to give it some dynamics. I love “Unmerciful” as well, the longest track on the album by a fair amount that stews in itself by way of a churning intro that gets collapsed in half by crispy double-bass notes and an intricate riff that sounds like something Temple Of Void would put together in their ascendant death-doom. Seven-minute death metal songs are genuinely hard to pull off without extensive use of open atmosphere or some despondent spoken word stuff to hammer themes home, but this is all killer, no filler.

That sort of thing is saved for the one-two punch combo of “Ceremony of Impiety” and “Void of Despair”, the first of the two being an eerie interlude that I actually like. Cinematic, scene-setting drums that I’d expect out of a slow-burn movie trailer create a sense of cautious wonder, then ominous pianos that feel astute and regal as if played by a stately vampire ruler in some castle bleed into the mix near the end. “Void of Despair” burns it all away with abject destruction from domineering instrumentation with a couple neat solos hidden in the middle like a death metal Kinder egg. “...Evocation (The Rebirth)” also exhibits some variance which makes for a great, if a little predictable, instrumental closing track for the album that’s still one of its best compositionally speaking.

Fragments Of The Ageless is quite solid work. It’s a bit of a shame then that the mix and production are so profoundly modern metal that it’s a detriment. You have to fight to hear the bass in a lot of spots, but sometimes it’s rested front and center for a shining moment like in the intro of “...Evocation (The Rebirth)” where you can hear its dank, low hum contribute additional textures to the track with no obstacles. More of this all around please!

Bottom Line: this is some maximalist ass-kick metal born from the tropes of a genre older than I am and yet Skeletal Remains is proof positive of what’s still possible after these four-ish decades, after refining and polishing, cutting to form and sharpening to a honed edge. Sometimes, all it takes is some well-thought-out approaches and writing to complement your raw skill, and Fragments Of The Ageless is draped in all of that.