Sigh...
I think I am in the minority here in that I like almost everything DSO has done equally, from Infernal Battles to Kenose.
I'm having a lot of trouble enjoying the new album. In fact, it is really pissing me off. There are a couple reasons.
First of all, SMRC was a huge step in a new direction for DSO and it worked brilliantly. Kenose was not as big of a step, but produced just as good results. Fas - Ite... is an even bigger step than both... but it is pointless.
The two things that immediately piss me off about this album are the drums and the ambience. I love drums and I love ambience, but not on this album. First to echo what has already been said, the drums are too loud. Especially the cymbals. I fucking hate cymbals high in the mix, it soaks up the treble frequencies and cheapens the guitar harmonics and is just super annoying in general - snares too, but to a lesser extent.
The ambience is mostly utter shit. DSO has taken the common black metal practice of putting atmospheric pieces onto an album and twisted it into progressive wankish fucktardery. When trying to create some kind of mood piece with extended ambient silence, why the fuck have random drum hits in it and twiddling guitar shit? Utterly fucking pointless. Almost without exception the ambient parts of this album sound more like minimalist progressive jam sessions than they do atmospheric music. See the 7:30 mark of "Shrine of Mad Laughter" for a rage inducing example.
This brings us to the biggest problem with the album and possibly what pisses me off the most. There is a significant lack of black metal in it. SMRC is too long by some standards (I think it is perfect), but it is also completely packed with black metal, the progressive/ambient parts are relatively short and work perfectly. Out of the 70+ minute album almost all of it is crushing black metal. Fas - Ite... out of a 45ish minute album, has maybe 20 minutes of black metal. To make this already henious fact worse is that the non-black metal parts are trash. Then, DSO uses this kind of progressive metal wierdness to go between the black metal and the ambient parts, and despite being progressive metal it is not much better than the ambient. See 3:45 - 4:30 or 6:15 - 7:00 of "Bread of Bitterness" for an example of a (shit) progressive metal transition.
If you look at an album like Thorns for example, in which there are long sections of ambience that work to great effect. I would never say that Thorns is only X minutes of black metal because of the ambient stuff in between, because those periods only add significance to the heavy parts. The jam sessions on Fas - Ite do nothing but fracture the songs into unrecognizable collections of riffs, void of any coherent emotion. The only way DSO has succeeded in conveying what they intended with this album is if they intended to convey extreme technicality in utterly random segments twitching from minimalism to maximalism.
To give people an idea of what this album sounds like, here is an actual breakdown of the song "Shrine of Mad Laughter"
0:00 - 2:45 - heavy, fast, pure progressive black metal
2:45 - 3:50 - silence
3:50 - 4:15 - some decent ambience
4:15 - 5:15 - black metal
5:15 - 6:10 - progressive metal with no sign of black
6:10 - 7:30 - black metal
7:30 - 8:45 - progressive minimalist jam
8:45 - 9:30 - black metal
9:30 - 10:40 - nothing
For those not mathematically inclined, that is a bit over 5 minutes of black metal on an 11 minute track. And that is pretty much indicative of the entire album.
Fas - Ite is not all bad. The actual black metal parts are incredible (except for the cymbals and snares). The vocals fit slightly better than Kenose and SMRC. But being honest here, I don't even feel like talking about what I like about the album because the rest of it is so frustrating.
I haven't given up on this. I'm going to listen to it more before I give my final opinion. I know for a fact though that I will never like it as much as the previous full-lengths for simple lack of material. A Chore For The Lost is really the only redeeming song on the album, which makes it fit poorly with the rest of the tracks.
I guess I considered myself a DSO fanboy, and still am to an extent, but I will not praise this album. If DSO does not change their direction on their next release they will be dead as far as I'm concerned.
Thinking about it some more, I am even more upset about this now. This could easily be a really incredible 20-25 minute EP. It's the fact that they drew it out to 45 minutes that is so lame. I LOVE long albums, most of my all time favorites are 60-70+ minutes. But not when there is so much ridiculously shitty filler. I don't know if DSO released this because they liked the way it worked or because they lacked material but wanted a full-length. Either way, not impressed.
I'll be listening to Inquisitors of Satan if anyone wants to discuss this.
