Band:	Orbit Culture
Album:	Descent
Style:	Groove death metal, Melodic death metal
Release date:	August 2023

01. Descending
02. Black Mountain
03. Sorrower
04. From The Inside
05. Vultures Of North
06. Alienated
07. The Aisle Of Fire
08. Undercity
09. Descent
10. Through Time

Three years ago, I reviewed Nija by Orbit Culture and said that the record showed “hints of a potentially great record to come, rather than being a great record in and of itself”. Frustratingly, three years on and the band are pretty much in the exact same position with Descent.

Sweden has a renowned heritage for melodic death metal, and Orbit Culture are part of the next wave of Swedish groups continuing this legacy. However, just like Swedish melodeath influenced the American metal scene around the turn of the millennium, the post-millennial American scene has had its influence on Orbit Culture, who incorporate groove metal and melodic metalcore into their sound. It’s a combination capable of rendering very successful results, and in patches that came through on Nija, but as a complete package it failed to strongly resonate with me. When I listen to Descent, there’s initial optimism that the group have sorted things out, but unfortunately this isn’t sustained across the full album runtime.

In terms of progression from Nija, I would say that the borderline industrial nature to the riffs I noted in my review of that record has been solidified a bit here; with it, there’s also a slightly more substantial electronic presence in parts. For me, this shift comes with pros and cons. For an example of a pro, I look towards “Black Mountain”, the first full song on the album. The emphatic repeated sound effect that persists throughout most of the song, and the thicker chugs that go with said effect, add a weight to this straightforward but hooky mid-tempo melodeath cut; the song also has a nice percussive atmospheric bridge passage that elevates it further.

The opening phase of Descent is relatively strong, albeit with some minor caveats. I’m initially unconvinced when “Sorrower” opens with what feels like a discarded Magma-era Gojira riff, but as the track evolves and transitions into a thrashier, speedier second half and an almost majestic climax (into which backing choirs/synths are incorporated well), it gains some life. Then, one of the album’s highlights comes in the form of “From The Inside”, which uses cleaner melodic overlays to add depth to the foundational chugging riff, and swells potently around the midway mark with organ-style synths and emphatic rapid double bass rolls. One could argue whether this opening trio of songs needs to have an average runtime of 6 minutes (certainly there’s some room to trim down in the first half of “Sorrower”), but overall they make a good impression; unfortunately, it’s after this point that I begin to struggle a bit with Descent.

After a few listens, I’ve landed upon two elements that I feel hold the album back. The first is the clean vocal sound of frontman Niklas Karlsson; in my Nija review, I compared the singing tone to Testament’s Chuck Billy, and I continue to find that a helpful reference point, but Karlsson’s singing is more nasal and lacks some of Billy’s charisma. The end result is that a majority of the clean sung passages on Descent end up feeling neutral at best, and detrimental at worst; this includes the chorus refrain on “Sorrower”, but detracts more for me on songs such as “Alienated” and “Undercity”. Curiously though, while I don’t love it on “From The Inside”, I don’t find the chorus to be off-putting, so perhaps there’s a narrow operating window in which this vocal approach works.

The bigger problem for me, though, is the over-reliance on monotonous chug riffs. I think this comes from the industrial influence; groovy, chunky, pitch-stable downtuned riffs are fairly commonplace in industrial metal. However, here, far too many songs open with mid-tempo one-chord chug riffs that feel like anyone could have produced them. It starts with “From The Inside”, but the additional texturing from the cleaner guitars doesn’t make it obvious. With “Vultures Of North”, the title track, and, after initial intro segments, “Alienated” and “Undercity”, there’s an over-reliance on ‘Download fodder’ riffs that come to feel very bland in succession. The songs aren’t all write-offs, with “Vultures Of North” surprisingly rising above a very mediocre first half to deliver quite an imposing second half, and “Undercity” evolving quite satisfyingly as it turns more melodic and epic later on (although it would have been more satisfying with a different clean vocalist). Still, this post-“From The Inside” stretch of Descent causes an unfortunate amount of my initial enthusiasm to dissipate.

This portion of the album isn’t bereft of variety and quality, however; “The Aisle Of Fire” sticks out like a sore thumb amidst all the songs mentioned in the previous paragraph, taking cues from Finnish melodeath in its melancholic riffs and lead guitar melodies. I feel like this is also one of the few songs where the sung chorus properly lands, although I still would be quite intrigued to see what, say, Tomi Joutsen could do with this song. Closing track “Through Time” is another one that feels a tad more Finnish than the rest of Descent, from the subdued opening clean tones through to the sad tapped guitar harmonies.

Descent feels like a bit of a ‘one step forward, one-two steps back’ situation. On the one hand, I’d say there’s more songs here that I actively enjoy than there were on Nija, but on the flip side, the latter stretch of the record is less consistently enjoyable. I don’t think Orbit Culture necessarily need to abandon the groove metal elements, since they work fine when they appear on “Black Mountain”, it’s just the monotonous riffing that takes over around the halfway mark is hard to muster much enthusiasm for. I hope it will be a case of ‘third time’s the charm’ with this record’s eventual successor, as I still think there’s the blueprints for a strong album lurking within Descent, although it remains to be seen whether I can be converted to the clean singing.