Enriched by telepathic discourse with those doomed and beached by the delirium of the Ancient Ones’ resonance New South Wales, Australia-based quartet OLDE OUTLIER venture through ancient blackened death and arcane heavy metal stride in realizing this idiosyncratic debut full-length album. Mutated by the desert winds of the Far Realm and loosed into dust-born singularity ‘From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves‘ offers a strong alternative to the usual mashing of ‘old school’ extreme metal traits into heavy metal formae in pairing nigh psychedelic worming movements with adventurous blackened death metal jog. Steadily morphing rhythmic presence and an at times free-handed stroke applied finds their songwriting crafted on its own terms in wizened simplicity where they’ve traded away brutality for a more deliberately stated experience beset by a broad allowance of tone and temperament to their work.

Olde Outlier haven’t divulged their impetus or too readily dispersed their details and such but some of these folks were involved in black/death metal band Grenade as well as the potentially better known Innsmouth, a slower-trudging death metal band in the age of caverncore and Autopsy cloneage. The latter group put out one of the Best Albums of 2014 for my own taste and I’ll suggest a spiritual but distant relation to that band was the reason I’d checked ‘From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves‘ in the first place. In any case the backgrounds of these folks is work exploring a bit as it naturally creates provenance per their name via both identity and intent. The gist of their inspiration for this work is mid-paced early 90’s black metal and the sound of ex-death metal bands approaching it only in this case ‘To Mega Therion‘ isn’t the catalyst for the riff and song structures are not tied traditional framing or intensity.

In fact as ‘From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves‘ kicks off with “The Revellers” their step is skillful, deliberate as if channeling a sleepier StarGazer to start in striding through ringing arpeggios, champion level bass runs and intense cymbal work for the first couple of minutes or so. It is a surprisingly bluster-void introduction to the band’s riff intensive yet mid-paced approach which is extreme heavy metal to be sure but growled and meandering in its directive. The point of daimonian grip on my part hit in reference to Hellenic black metal riffcraft starting about ~3:17 minutes in as we begin to recall these folks are, by a degree or two removed, relevant to the history of Sacriphyx. If you know that band, and you should, you’ll appreciate much of what Olde Outlier bring here albeit with a very different tone and intensity. Also, for the sake of trivia here I believe the cover artist for this album as well as ‘Consumed by Elder Sign‘ and ‘The Western Front‘ was the band’s vocalist Mark Appleton (Roadside Burial, Miscreation) and as a fan of all of those things the connection was worth nerding on. As that first song dissolves beyond the six minute mark we get our first taste of weirding via something like throat singing laced within the respite on the way to the end, a movement which feels like the sort of mind-expander you’d find playing off a song on ‘Spiritech‘-era Alchemist.

Though they’ve not at all stormed out the gates with any sort of brutality the sensation of tunneling through their greater trip is intensified by the effect of a meandering yet ‘epic’ opener. “The Pounding of Hooves” creeps toward the three minute mark pinging at the room-noise assisted bap of the snare, a hollowness which rings across the floor of the space depicted before giving pause and redirecting into wyrding black metal search. This creep-and-snarl step uses repetition with some slight variation to build its ladder upward alongside the hymnal groan of the backing vocals, one of the more fixated points on the full listen; Long as these songs are, averaging eight minutes or more, most of Olde Outlier‘s work gives plenty of room to breathe and develop their own atmospheric ranting further. Each of the four songs on ‘From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves‘ does this to some degree but I’d particularly enjoyed the Varathron-esque black/doom spiral found on “The Pounding of Hooves” per its hypnotic persistence across the bulk of the piece, it’d compounded this sense that this’ll be a journey and not just a somewhat borderless ancient deal.

If the first ~19 minutes of ‘From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves‘ hadn’t already convinced you of the ‘epic’ heavy metal stride beneath their growling and shrieking face Olde Outlier bring something unavoidably representative on the weird-ass dark metallic strolling striding collapse of “Swept“, another song which uses repetition of a ear-worming riff to generate spectacle. The very brief Arghoslent jog around ~3:37 minutes or so breaks up the repetition in a meaningful way while helping to exacerbate the connection this album makes between roots in traditional heavy metal riffcraft and how this translates to the best of ancient extreme metal. This most clearly speaks to the concept, or, intent of their work despite spanning tonality from Scandinavian dark metal, Hellenic black metal, raw death metal gnashing and ambitious early-to-mid 80’s epic heavy metal… the kind of thing fans of Mi’gauss and later Armoured Angel would appreciate as much as early Katatonia or Rotting Christ.

The suggested cornucopia of inspiration should be evident enough at this point but so should Olde Outlier‘s knack for blurring it all together into a transformed statement rather than a cut-and-paste assay of obscure taste, an amalgam that is still writhing into new territory via the gallop into the eerie finale of “All is Bright”. I wasn’t on board with the hymnal dark metal drift in the final third of the closer but it no doubt leaves the ear hanging on a memorable note, finalizing an album with its own ragged yet spaced character. These folks’ve managed a familiar yet distinct stance with ‘From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves‘, an off-kilter extreme form of heavy metal given character via difficult-to-pin tonal veer and a well-possessed wandering hand. A high recommendation.

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