Review: Be’lakor - “Stone’s Reach” (2009)
Be’lakor’s second album Stone’s Reach, an intricate, ambitious tapestry of melodic death metal, is clearly the type of album that takes several listens before you can even begin to appreciate it. Unfortunately, after numerous plays I was left scratching my head wondering if I was missing something. Be’lakor is obviously extremely talented - each song on the album is practically bursting with riffs, time changes and shifts in tone, but rather than being a strong point I think this ends up being the album’s major flaw. With the constant flux and complexity it becomes difficult to latch onto anything, and even the handful of good riffs don’t end up lasting very long.
Like much melodic death metal albums, intricate dual guitar interplay backed with almost constant double-bass drumming is the basis of Stone’s Reach, although Be’lakor take a lot of liberties with the traditional melodic death approach. There are a scattering of minor-key Gothenburg-type riffs, but the band also throws in some bright-sounding solos on top, some softer acoustic or piano parts and some keyboards for additional atmosphere. If you’re a fan of complex, melodic, guitar-driven music I’d say that this album will probably more than satisfy your appetites, but to me all of the different elements just result in the songs being very inconsistent.
There were certainly a few bright spots here and there. Lots of people seem to point to ‘Sun’s Delusion’ as one of the album’s better tracks, and though it does have a promising start and features a couple pretty good riffs later in the song, the rest of the track’s 9 minutes failed to really draw the song’s good ideas together in any effective way, something which in general is also true of the other tracks on the album.
The lone highlight for me was the last track, the 10-minute epic ‘Countless Skies’, which is dominated by very catchy riff that opens the song and recurs throughout. More importantly though, Be’lakor seems to have dialed things back and taken a simpler approach on this song instead of trying to catch your attention with every single riff, so when the main melody comes back, the impact on the listener is that much greater. I just wish they’d done that on the rest of the songs.
