April 14, 2010 • Forcefield Records
I saw Inter Arma in concert back in the summer of 2010 and was impressed enough with them to buy their CD Sundown. They were indeed quite good live—raucous, loud, intense, everything you want in a metal show. The album is a bit of a letdown in comparison, although I would say it still represents the band pretty well and is a decent listen.
Their sound is so hard to describe, let alone pigeonhole into a genre... in the first song alone they switch from black metal to sludge to some sort of southern groove style. Such eclecticism can of course be a good thing as it makes the music much more interesting and engaging, but on the other hand it can sometimes be confusing and alienating. For me, Sundown tends to flip back and forth between those two extremes. I suppose it depends on my mood. Unfortunately, the tracks that don't switch up often tend to get dull quickly—such as "Epicenter", which is basically one long repeated riff. But much of the songwriting and such is still pretty good—lots of nice heavy, crunchy bits. It's a very ballsy kind of metal, you could say.
The other big downside to the album is that the production is atrocious; it sounds like it was recorded live although I'm pretty sure it wasn't. The mixing strips out pretty much everything but the mid-frequency range, making the album sound very muddy. It's not something one notices after a while, but it's still a bit fatiguing.
Sundown definitely won't be for everyone, and even after several listens for me it still doesn't click that well. But for what it is, it's not too shabby and I'm sure it will find fans in plenty of places.
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