Reviews

With a name like The Concubine, you instantly know what genre you are dealing with - Metal. Metal is very hit and miss with me; sometimes it’s glorious in its brutality and power, like Slayer, Mastadon, Pantera or Megadeth. Other times it’s just as former Mr. Show regular Brian Poshen sings on his fake metal song “Metal By Numbers;” “Cookie monster vocals/or yell like a wookie/metal by numbers/cookie cookie cookie.” The Concubine are not stand outs like Slayer but they definitely separate themselves from the millions of sub-par metal bands floating around the scene.
 
Abandon is the band's first with ex-Long Winter vocalist Dave Stahl. Although, to be honest, there is not a huge difference between Stahl's voice and ex-singer Mat Olivio's, so it’s clearly not a Roth/Haggar-esque change over. To be perfectly blunt, in this form of metal, all the singer really has to do is provide some deep guttural shouts and amp up the crowd, all of which Stahl seems to handle rather well on the record.
 
The real star of this band is guitarist Dan Pilla. Pilla's axe work is masterful and brutally fast but his playing is not afraid of retaining melody. Words like “melody” and “pretty” will probably get you beat up at a metal show but that's what helps The Concubine stay one step ahead of fellow head bangers. His solos are the only real stand outs on a disc which is mostly heavy hitting sludge metal picked up every once and a while with some meaty drum fills so you know it’s a different song than the one before it. For example, on “Regnum Crurois,” Pilla's dazzling intro is the only bit of music we haven't heard to death by this point. Yes, the crushing drums with lots and lots of double kick, the growling vocals and the non existent bass have all been there before.
 
The Concubine doesn't do its damage with speed but often with slow, heavy blows. The sound of The Concubine is like getting slammed into the ground by an ugly, grumbling giant. The beginning of the track “Amaranthine,” sounds like war drums from an ancient battle taking place somewhere near Middle Earth by way of War Hammer. The band seems to struggle with identity a lot on Abandon. Once they get into a heavy head banging groove, they immediately change their tempos and speed up the song, which really doesn't help the songs as a whole very much.
 
Metal heads will probably enjoy The Concubine but it is nothing powerful enough to find cross over appeal like Mastadon enjoyed earlier with Blood Mountain. The band as a whole seems very confident in what they do because that's about all they do; slow intro, cookie monster vocals, heavy groove, random speed up, slow down, speed up and then slow down again. There is nothing essential about this album but if you are looking for some good, head banging material until the next Slayer record comes out, this should hold you over for about a week or two.