ENTHEOS
Time Will Take Us All
METAL BLADE
10/10
PROGRESSIVE DEATH METAL: Entheos is back with its first record in five long years, Time Will Take Us All. Comprised of husband and wife duo—multi-instrumentalist Navene Koperweis and vocalist Chaney Crabb—this is the pair’s darkest and most ambitious work to date. The overarching theme to the album seems to be the fleeting nature of time and the feeling that there is such little time to experience a world as vast as our own. Written during a period of time when Crabb was recovering from an unfortunate electric scooter accident that left her with 100 stitches in her face and unable to move her lips or record vocals for three months, the album has a sense of brooding, foreboding doom that hovers above everything and carries through its entirety—cultivated through layering of atmospheric guitar parts over tightly syncopated and evil sounding tech death riffs and drums.
This bleeds from one song into the next, in one long continuous journey. Crabb’s lyrics sort through her struggle to pull herself out of depression, as on ferocious album opener “Absolute Zero,” or her feelings on mortality, grappling with the uncertainty regarding her recovering from her injuries and of being stuck in the mundanity of daily life on tracks “In Purgatory” and “The Interior Wilderness.” Because the album is more or less one continuous piece broken into sections as tracks, Crabb’s lyrical motifs also repeat across songs, adding to the feeling of being stuck, trapped by the weight of fears and regrets as time rushes by.
As one might expect from Entheos, the musicianship on this record is absurd. While it may feel continuous, the record is incredibly dynamic, ebbing and flowing in aggression and heaviness, giving the listener a reprieve one moment, only to yank the rug out from under them the next. Crabb’s guttural vocal range has only grown even greater on the low end, while her signature high screams and rapid-fire staccatos are even punchier, as on “The Sinking Sun.”
Further, this record sees Crabb experimenting with clean vocals for the first time, at times layering them with pitched screams and high gutturals to great effect, as on “I Am the Void.” The album closer and title track ties up this record perfectly, with Crabb belting out, “I’ve been counting the days as they pass, I’ve been waiting for the world to come to an end.” Personal journey aside, Crabb and Koperweis certainly have spent the last five years well. Time Will Take Us All is sure to be one of the best metal records of 2023 and the greatest of Entheos’ career. ~ Nathan Katsiaficas
