Hero’s Fate: Human Tides: Black Light Inception (2012)

Tracklist:

1. Invoking the Doom (intro)
2. Blood Will Never Run Dry
3. Drowning in Sorrow
4. Apathy
5. Dead Waters (instrumental)
6. Faceless
7. I Am King
8. Masks
9. The Absence of Light
10. Surrogate of a New World
11. Dawn of the Black Light
12. Tranquillity

It’s never seemed like there’s been that much ground to cover between the backwaters of human despair to the interior of recording studios, but Hero’s Fate may well have stumbled upon uncharted territory.  A German death metal outfit who’ve been going for some years, Human Tides: Black Light Inception is their first full-length release.  Weighing in at almost exactly one-hour’s length, it’s a record the band claim “combines the strengths of their music, creating the perfect mix between melody and aggression, deep lyrics and catchy riffs.”

If the classical philosophers were to characterise the experience of death metal, they might make illusions to being tied to the flanks of a raging bull thundering its way through the gates of Hades.  If they were to come up against Hero’s Fate, they might have to think again.  Human Tides: BLI is, rather, the smooth and sour mash of death you’d experience slumped across a battered leather seat in a warm, smoke-filled room, heavily dosed with the soft, mellow sounds of deep strings and reverberating guitars.

Where, then, to place the music?  As a sub-genre, it could hardly be anywhere other than “melodic death metal”.  What’s notable, then, is how few “melodies” there actually are.  What gives the album its unique edge is a combination of rich, harmonic textures built up by deep and clear bass strings, atop of which float layers of broken guitar chords, ponderously picking their way around medium-tempo beats.  Melodies there certainly are, but when they appear, they’re understated and reflective, quite apart from the swathing exuberance of many melodeath material.  Slow and deliberate, these are often shaped by the spikes of plucked guitar harmonies, moving with the changing of the chords.  When cut loose from harmonic material, riffs and solos generally maintain the prevailing mood with tremolos and mellow tones.

This cuts a continual contrast with the aggression with the deep, guttural growls of the vocals and the thunderous crashing of block chords and drum beats.  In it’s approach, it may not be unique: Opeth and Eventide, amongst others, have successfully wound their way through these back-alleys of musical contrast, playing off soft and harsh textures with considerable success.  But what sets Hero’s Fate apart is the prevalence of the soft, which often continues unbroken even amongst the blackest of evil moods.  And wherever one side takes dominance, there’s such seamless transitions as to blend the two into one another: take track 9, The Absence of Light, where the music twice rises to the edge of aggressive outbursts, the first time to fall into the fiery abyss, the second to draw back in quiet contemplation.  And, never fearful of letting the music weave its own path, our benefactors offer up track 5, Dead Waters, as a superb instrumental offering.

 

The massive depth of the music reflects the heavy depths of the lyrical content.  Again to quote the band themselves: the album “conceptually explores the escape of an individual into darkness and searching for light and deliverance in the emotional black.”  On the surface, it’s clear this is tied to established metal themes of individual identity (or, rather, loss thereof), sorrow, anger, and pain.  And the usual stuff’s all there, too: “Masks to hide what I am” (track 8, Masks); “…no spark of hope for him in this world” (track 6, Faceless); “Looking through these tired eyes/No hope no love no guiding light” (track 2, Blood Will Never Run Dry).

 

But there’s another way to see the lyrics, aside from just repetitions of tired and monotonous metal moanings.  Again and again, they seem to portray the despair of a world bereft of all meaning and direction, a product of the nihilism of modernity, which has left mankind bereft of the sacred.  Throughout, there’s a big, big emphasis on a loss of direction in life, for example in track 6, Faceless: “…no path to walk on”; and in the following song, I Am King: “…tries to cross to a life that’s worth”.  If this is the substance for so much of the pain and loss felt in the album, then the lack of substance in the life of the protagonist seems heavily linked to an inability to tie the experiences of life into a coherent whole.

 

On the one hand, this lack of human meaning calls for reconciliation: “I won’t fear it any longer the void and me become one” (track 10, Surrogate of a New World); on the other, its oppressive emptiness is a force which remains simply overwhelming to the obscure and insignificant human actor, leaving lost an bewildered at the prospect of a morally-guided world: “Though I walk through the darkest valley I fear no evil but I fear the light”.

 

A world without meaning; a life without direction: this might just be the “Hero’s Fate” alluded to in the band’s name.  The final song spells its inevitable conclusion, culminating with the words “Everything coming to an end/This is how life is meant”. If so, it’s a tale reflected in the cover illustration, in which the shadow of an ordinary – and uninspiring, slightly overweight, at that – bloke stands before a chasm in the sky.  At the same time, it represents an absence of light and the enormity of the hostile universe, against which man stands helpless.

Or perhaps it doesn’t.  After all, it could all mean that he’s just a bit depressed.  And, in all fairness, the lyrics don’t ever approach to chasmic depth and intensity of the music, even if they are written satisfyingly well from a linguistic perspective.  There’s a general failure to break out of the old frameworks of dark/light, sorrow/loss, and violence/despair which pervade so much of metal.  And it’s not particularly helped by the thick, fluffy quality of growls, which, at times, make it all but impossible to identify the lyrics correctly, even when they’re written on a sheet in front of you.

 

But why end on a bad note?  For all the complaints regarding lyrics, they’re good enough to stand on their own two feet, especially by comparison to much of the senseless ramblings which weave themselves around metal today.  In any case, the quality and execution of the music – ingenious in its simplicity, intensity, and cohesion – is easily good enough to pull the album through with flying colours.  Nothing stands more to its credit than the feeling that, without ever blowing your face off, the music could happily roll on indefinitely without getting tired.  Perhaps mercifully, for those of us with day jobs, Hero’s Fate haven’t given us the option.  In the end, the album runs through a perfectly unobjectionable structure, from an opening intro through the depths of emotion, via another superb instrumental, and on to a devastated ending.  It’s powerful, original, and, above all, massively satisfying.  Available now on their website for €7.  You’d be a dunce to pass it over.

Production: 5/5

Lyrics: 3/5

Album Cohesion: 4/5

Music: 9/10

Percentage Score: 84%

 

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