Go to many bands albums/EP pages on Bandcamp and beneath all the various format pricings and track listings but above the line-up info and the production credits you will often find a blurb, sometimes this blurb will have been written by a member of the band, sometimes by the bands label , sometimes by a PR agent and on some occasions by a friendly journalist. This blurb usually gives you a little bit of history about the band, a few words about the recording process and if its an album with a concept a few lines explaining the theme. Go to that section of RIFFT's latest release "Death Peace" however and you are met with just one line, "Death Peace: A heavy metal album by RIFFT", eight words that say a lot but don't quite manage to cover the whole story... which is where we come in.
Calling "Death Peace" a heavy metal album is, Desert Psychlist suspects, a bit of a tongue in cheek statement and we say that because this is an album packed to its rafters with elements and essences drawn from a wide range of genres and styles, for example opening instrumental "Feed Your Fear" with its ambient droning atmospherics and weird clicks and whirls is probably about as far removed from heavy metal as it is possible to get. Things do get a little more metallic on next track "An Unforgiving Sky" but that's more due to heftiness of its guitar and bass tones and the occasional swings of its vocals into grittier realms than anything else because the songs overall feel is mostly post metallic and proggish, albeit with a plethora of doomic textures thrown in for good measure. It's back to the weirdness for the strangely unsettling "Dewdrops" where we are faced with droning dark noise, effect generated whoops and whistles and remote sounding drums framing passages of spoken word, off-kilter and slightly sinister it sets the scene nicely for the following "The Necromancer's Door" a thrusting, at times jerky, tome that for its most part features crunching heavy riffage and thunderous rhythms but on occasions wanders into prog-like territories where it is accompanied by clean somewhat lilting vocal melodies and harmonies.. Continuing their path of delivering moody experimental pieces next to more traditional heaviness RIFFT serve up "Love and Error" next, this piece mixing elements of Americana with a raft of electronic effects over what sounds like sampled narrative from a movie. "Don't Be A Stranger" follows, here we find RIFFT going up and down the gears with sections of blustering heaviness trading off with dynamics of a more tender and languid quality while title track "Death Peace" is a meandering, roaming opus that pulls together threads from right across the musical spectrum, elements of Americana, country, blues, psych, doom and even a little hardcore can be found on this sprawling epic along with one of the albums best vocal performances. RIFFT make up for the lack of an off piste slice of weirdness between the last two tracks by putting one at the end of the album, "The Insects Made Sentience in the Wolf’s Carcass", this one an ambient woodwind serenade that uses the sound of nature as its backdrop
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