On the second full-length from Richmond, VA's heavy psychedelic alchemists Inter Arma, danger and apocalypse always loom nearby, casting long shadows over everything within sight. In these eight songs, the destroyer becomes the vaunted creator. Humankind sends the earth into a vortex of despair and decay. End-times gloom represents a lone currency of hope. The music is made to match, too, with salvos of rapid-fire black metal and plumes of foreboding instrumental drift lightning the lantern toward darkness.
Listening to Sky Burial, however, is one of the most exhilarating experiences you might hope to have with a record, largely because its creators sound so obviously intoxicated and energized by the possibilities of music itself. As these five multi-instrumentalists and experimenters work through creaking doom and obliterative marches, smoldering introductions and scowling grooves, the sense that they’re loving every moment of this is pervasive. They foreground their enthusiasm and counter the darkness with contagious élan. Appropriate for an album so obsessed by the beginnings that endings can bring, Sky Burial’s misanthropic heart is inspired enough to make one, well, happy.
At nearly 70 minutes, Sky Burial is a massive stylistic crucible where unlikely influences and aspirations bleed and blur into one another. Inter Arma represents a convergence of disparate traditions-- Led Zeppelin and Lightning Bolt, Pink Floyd and Pentangle, Immortal and Enslaved, Sleep and the Staple Singers. Though all these strains share the same space, Inter Arma never sounds claustrophobic, meaning they give each component its due before showing how it can cooperate with the next approach. Acoustic interludes in the midst of loud rock records, for instance, certainly aren’t novel ideas, but when Inter Arma push away from the amps and drop the howls, the acoustic instrumentals don’t function as mere sideshows. Lined with sighing steel guitar and sustained piano notes, the four-minute “The Long Road Home (Iron Gate)” shows similar development to the 10-minute epics that bookend it. Inter Arma opens its successor, “The Long Road”, with more than seven minutes of rising rock ’n’ roll action, reaching the It Still Moves-sized limits of My Morning Jacket before catapulting, without hesitation, into a malevolent Scandinavian-influenced blast. At one point, “Westward” flips from a patchwork of noise and grindcore into the sort of open-wheel blues metal you’d expect from millennial Allman descendants.
One could counter, of course, that being stoked on making music isn’t enough to make said music good. The teenager enlisting friends to join a basement rock band is certainly zealous, but that doesn’t mean their tunes are worthy of your time. But Inter Arma isn’t just ardent. Rather, these songs are both well designed and well executed. The ingenious “’sblood” rides the same riff and rhythm for most of its six minutes, while Mike Paparo shouts four repetitive lines about the limits of the earth. He breaks the lines into pairs, though, a device that the band uses to create a tripwire of tension as the audience awaits the conclusion. Opener “The Survival Fires” might be the band’s best dexterity showcase to date. Drummer and instrumental cleanup man T.J. Childers works through demanding patterns; he rolls into stuttering beats and lumbers into distended grooves. The guitars match the action, countering the central theme with grinding dissonance and sudden breakaways. In metal, this sort of spirit without the skills to match can be a missed opportunity, while the skills without the spirit can be worse still. Musically, Inter Arma is good enough to manage all of these sounds; emotionally, they are excited enough to make them work in one righteous exhortation.
Sky Burial will likely land as one of the year’s great breakthroughs for a heavy act, standing, at least in my mind, as the same sort of pay-attention proclamation as the Body’s All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood in 2010 or Pallbearer’s Sorrow and Extinction in 2012. That’s good news for Relapse Records, the venerable metal syndicate that picked up Inter Arma after their fine full-length debut, Sundown. But listening to Sky Burial, you get the sense that an escalation of notoriety won’t change Inter Arma so much. They are, after all, already making music that doesn’t make sense on paper. Segue the Southern rock instrumental into Second Wave black metal screech? Sure. Volley from tightly wound prog into swaggering stoner land? OK.
The root of Inter Arma’s creative success seems to be their delight in stubbornness, their willingness to indulge what they’d like to indulge, with no need to negotiate genre expectations. In this post-everything moment, where multiple sounds often arrive at once, it’s common for young musicians to exist as magpies, collecting stylistic scraps only to display them as their own piece. It is, however, much rarer for those results to seem so wholly synthesized, even as the individual parts don’t buckle under the weight of their accoutrements. Sky Burial does just that, brandishing erudition just enough to arrive at a crossroads of inspiration and innovation.
