The Alchemont - The Pinnacle of the Mind's Evil EP (2007)

 I must have seen The Alchemont live a half dozen times at least, and always found them hard to get into.  It isn't that they are doing anything wrong, but the sound they had is so busy-sounding that if is imperative that they had a very good mix to allow the ear to make sense of it... and the gigs I saw them at never provided them such.   This is a tale we all know all too well, all of us suffer with mix issues more often than not, but even then, Alchemont seemed to get hammered with some extra lousy mixes.  One wonders if it is always the fault of the venues and the mixers, or if the Alchemont's sound just did not transfer well to the live enviroment.
 

With the "Pinnacle of the Mind's Evil" EP, the studio recording and mix quite effectively takes a hedgetrimmer to the clutter and shapes it into something a lot more understandable.  The muddy wall of noise is replaced by instruments with definition and clarity for the most part, and this is a real relief.  These were a bunch of young guys with heavy tastes who just went into a room and jammed out, and wrote some unusual, avant-garde and quite complex melodic blackmetal inspired songs.  Aswell as being heavy and melodic, The Alchemont show some deviations from the realms of the hidebound, particularly in the delightfully uncomfortable structure changes and the moments of extreme dischordance.  All instruments are used in unusual ways, nothing is written to be easy to play or easy to digest.  There is a definate hint of profane creativity going on here, maybe the name "Alchemont" came from the forbidden science of Alchemy?

Vocals by the infamous Jamie are used sparingly - somewhat TOO sparingly I feel - and alternate between black and death metal delivery for the most part.  More of an accompaniment to the music rather than a dominant instrument, his vocals are backed up with sound efffects and a few samples, including a very recognisable Hellraiser quote.  Guitars are intricate and vicious sounding and work very closely with the keys much of the time, and unlike most bands of the MBM genre the keys closely follow the guitar lines even when they are complicated rather than playing a seperate accompaniment to them.  This takes either many years of practice or an impressive talent, and Tristan certainly could play the shit out of the boards with an alarming degree of accuracy.  This comes at a price however, not only does this steal a little of the aggression from the guitars, but I would estimate that 50% of all he is playing is lost to the mix.  That said, where it works it is very effective.   But then all that complexity and involution is less than worthless without a drummer who can work with it, and there we have "the Mikey".

Well known in the local scene for his eccentric personality and off-the-wall antics, Mikey transfers his psyche to the kit beautifully, working the drums in the same haywire way he takes to everything.   His fills are nuts, his kick patterns tripped out, little blast patterns and off-time rhythms bubble up here and there..... it's like he is drumming on a combination of a lot of uppers and downers and he is mentally wandering from lazerbeam focus to complete loss of attention.  Its sort of Metal Fusion, and he really does extremely well in this EP. 
He now is whacking skins for Khariot, a band seemingly with even more elaboration and trickery... and right up his alley I would think.

  The Alchemont were the main victims of the Sasquatch Scandal, and lost plenty of money to that conman.  They dissolved - or at least went into suspended animation - very soon after, possibly their hearts were broken and they lost the drive to keep at it.   A shame really, at 4 songs of length and less than 17 minutes long, "The Pinnacle of the Mind's Evil" is done by the time you have sat down to listen to it, and I reckon that the boys from the Alchemont still had a hell of a lot more to show us.

Review by Jez.