Upon Stone: Dead Mother Moon (2024, Century Media Records)

Today I came across the release of Dead Mother Moon by chance, the debut album by the Californian melodic death metal band Upon Stone. It happens to be difficult to keep track of all the albums that are published throughout the month, and I must admit that this one was not in my sights, however thanks to its striking cover I have plunged headlong into seeing what they could do for me. offer the four young musicians from Los Angeles in their debut work and at the outset I must say that I was very pleasantly surprised.

We could say that Upon Stone is a melodic death metal band at first glance although I must admit that there are many more layers to their music and that labeling a band in the end is a complicated feat and in the case of Upon Stone it couldn’t be more difficult. The basis of their music is death metal, especially if we focus on the vocal technique of their vocalist and also bassist Xavier Wahlberg.

The music, on the other hand, is based on old school death metal, that of bands like Carcass or the first Arch Enemy albums with Johan Liiva, although at times it becomes somewhat more aggressive and wild, getting closer to thrash metal or one of my favorite bands from the European scene, Gorefest, as in the case of To Seek And Follow The Call Of Lions.

The duration of the album is quite tight, with a total duration of 31 minutes over nine songs among which we find an instrumental song with a certain aroma of Ulver‘s atmospheric black metal in its Kveldssanger stage (1995, Voices Music & Entertainment), which seems to me to be a complete and resounding success. However, we find much heavier and melodic songs like Dusk Sang Fairest, which at certain points has brought me reminiscences of the incredible Heartwork (1993, Earache Records) by Carcass.

In the case of Dead Mother Moon I have come across a combination of melodic death metal from the mid-nineties that has sometimes reminded me of the Swedish In Flames with their Colony (1999, Nuclear Blast) album combined with some more forceful passages that could well having been part of Arch Enemy‘s glorious debut album Black Earth (1996, Savage Messiah Music).

If I had to list the songs that I liked the most from Dead Mother Moon, those would be Onyx Through The Heart and The Lantern, two songs that manage to capture the essence of this quartet perfectly in which guitarists Ronny Lee Marks and Gage achieve offer a very sharp work on the melodic base in which drummer Wyatt Bentley totally shines. Once again I must recognize the great work of Xavier Wahlberg on the voice, offering his particular vocal technique in a masterful way.

What surprised me most about the album is the cover artwork, in addition to being the first thing I noticed from Death Mother Moon, where we can see a futuristic knight with a particular armor and the moon in the background in a totally inhospitable place. This is a cover that could easily have been used on any classic heavy metal album and that stands out here precisely for giving more versatility to its proposal, offering something different with a lot of class and style.

I must also give an extra point to the album for including a very original version of one of my favorite Misfits songs, the brutal Dig Up Her Bones, which also serves as a bonus track for an album that will remain on my list of favorites for a long time. time in complete safety. Good job, guys.