Review Summary: The West is eating itself again, but this time around Imperial Triumphant have a seat at the dinner table for everyone
Imperial Triumphant’s artistic vision must be a nightmare to reinterpret across successive works—in just how many guises can one wrench 1930s New York opulence from the bowels of history and repurpose it as a springboard for avant-minded, dissonance-blighted metal extremity? How do you go any further down that route after producing a work as fully-realised as 2020’s
Alphaville? Although their output hit a turgid patch in the years following that towering record, the NYC trio seem to have found their answer by playing fast and loose, by delighting in the umpteen aesthetic tensions within their sound and focusing on the explosive potential of each rather than the tableau they once wove from their seamless integration.
Their 2023
Covers EP teased their newly playful approach to fission over fusion, stacking Dizzy Gillespie alongside Metallica alongside Radiohead, but on
Goldstar they go one step further, taking their fixation on luxury and consumption to one of its logical extremes: chaotic instant gratification. This record is compact and forceful like nothing you’ll have heard from them before: each track is paced as though the fall of civilisation is quite literally around the corner, and the writing process seems to interpret this as licence for as many last-ditch Dionysian thrills as can be crammed into one serving. Early highlight “Gomorrah Nouveaux” is a poster child here: from fierce riffage to clownish spirals into dissonance to the momentous keyboards it layers over pummelling blast beats in its bridge to its umpteen creative touches (those opening drums! that slap bass!), it showcases a band less committed to subjugating their audience to a nauseous hellscape than they are hell-bent on dishing out one good time after another.
So it goes! For a record so contorted, so adventurously indulgent,
Goldstar is deceptively accessible, so much so that it takes even its most absurd moments in its stride. There are plenty of unashamedly hammy touches here that would have scanned as mawkish eyerollers on previous outings (see "Lexington Delirium"’s belaboured cookie monster narration three minutes in, or the gauche
hail Satan voiceover phoned in on "Hotel Sphinx"), but given the band's generosity in dishing out crowd-pleasers, one can hardly begrudge them the occasional wink to the camera. Compared to 2022’s
Spirit of Ecstasy, which demanded prohibitive extents of suspension of disbelief to prop up its stuffy convolutions,
Goldstar by and large does away with smoke and mirrors, expressing itself in the language of pure entertainment. The band’s signature decadence and indulgence aren’t so much a spectacle we're compelled to shudder at as a twisted delight we're invited to share.
At its best, this makes for a sensational ride, comparable in scope to the high-octane barnburner Pyrrhon dished out on last year's
Exhaust, but with ample theatrical flourishes and jazz-addled versatility to reach out to a broader audience. The opening combination of “Eyes of Mars” and “Gomorrah Nouveaux” show this approach at its most focused, while the late highlight “Pleasuredome” goes above and beyond to deliver on its title-premise—we’re treated to some of the band’s fruitiest jazz fusion fretwork to date amidst a barrage of percussive mania that leans on the drumming chops of Slayer’s Dave Lombardo and serves up the album’s most grin-inducing head***. Anyone coming out of “Pleasuredome” hungry for something more linear can content themselves with the closer "Industry of Misery", a wildly satisfying finale that thrives on every twist and turn, from thunderous early riffage to a guitar solo so melodramatic it could have come straight from the latest Dream Theater record to a climactic interpolation of the Beatles’ proto-doom slugger “I Want You (She’s so Heavy)”. As far as sheer dopamine is concerned, you’d be a rare grade of miser to turn your nose up at this tracklist.
However,
Goldstar occasionally struggles to define itself beyond a series of arcanely-fashioned cheap thrills. This is exacerbated by a structural issue: apropos the cover artwork, Imperial Triumphant have inadvertently sculpted an hourglass figure for the tracklist itself, with the most substantive tracks nearest the top and tail, and a series of increasingly lightweight throwaways concentrated around the middle. In lieu of an album centrepiece we have an underutilised feature from Bloody Panda's Yoshiko Ohara, whose hair-raising vocal performance is wasted on the forty seconds of blast beats the band churn out like an afterthought on "NEWYORKCITY"; the following old-world radio skit of the title-track feels purpose-crafted to trace out a mushroom cloud in the wake of this explosion, but the album’s disjointed pacing relegates it to settling into the dust itself.
One can write off these tracks' combined two minutes as a brief misfire, but they in turn are bookended by the record's least essential full tracks. "Rot Moderne" is by far the least aesthetically engaging piece here, focusing entirely on the homogenous death metal onslaught the rest of the tracklist takes such creative measures to avoid, and while “Hotel Sphinx” may be the strongest track of the central run, its songwriting lacks the centre of gravity that the album highlights furnish so well. At one point, the track cuts back to a sinister keyboard measure that (to my ears at least) interpolates the opening measure of the hymn “The Lord is My Shepherd” but strips it of its traditional resolving cadence, locking the piece into an ever-ascending progression that it climbs like a Sisyphean hillside—whichever way you hear it, it adds an inspired touch of slow-burning desperation that would have felt right at home in
Alphaville’s grandiose songwriting, but is served rather poorly here when the band abruptly barrel back into their opening verse and snuff the section out the moment it has begun to register.
At points like these, I question whether
Goldstar ever rises above the sum of its parts—and only to counter-question whether this is strictly necessary. I know a good thing when I hear it, Imperial Triumphant have done themselves proud by putting such heavy emphasis on tactile fun; if this comes at the cost of producing a transcendent whole, then you would do well to remember exactly how endangered the notion of ‘fun’ is to begin with within the self-serious landscape of dissonant death metal.
Party on seems to be the enlightened choice here. Whether
Goldstar falls short of being a masterpiece or whether it eschews the notion entirely is for the clean-up gang to quibble over the morning after.
