G&P Review: Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky

Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky
The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry
Nuclear Blast
If nothing else, before I sliced the shrink wrap off of The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry, Florida’s Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky had already notched a fairly significant achievement: making me give a shit about a Nuclear Blast album for the first time since In Flames dropped Clayman nearly a decade prior.
But even that achievement pales when you realize every aspect of SWWAATS’s full length debut has been honed to lethality by precision death metal craftsmen with an added boost of Sunshine State death cred courtesy of producer James Murphy.
Guitarists Aaron Lee Haines and Ian Sturgill put the spazz in freak-core unit Bodies in the Gears in the Apparatus, but like their former frontman Joshua Vitale (who briefly belched life into tofu grinders Khann) the six string duo go for something meatier and more visceral and menacing than BitGotA’s light footed trickster rhythms. Unfortunately, they didn’t leave the prior band’s wordiness behind, though. “Automated Oration and the Abolition of Silence,” the album title and even the band’s name all suffer from a bad case of abomination of unnecessarily augmented composition monickers.
But I quibble because SWWAATS have developed one of the most intriguing personas currently working in death metal. From the snake handler freak show lyrics to Colin Marks’ robed menace art, SWWAATS conjure the same mystique that cloaked the earliest incarnation of Cancuckleheads Kataklysm. Lead off track “10,000 Sermons, 1 Solution” interweaves wailing Eastern melodies through the chunky death metal foreground.
Though the chunky death metal is the star, SWWAATS give sample swiper Jen Muse her moment to shine on the audio pastiche of “Retrograde and the Annointed.” SWWAATS also cleverly subverts doom cliché on death crawl “Colossus,” the shortest song on the album that clocks in on a respectably grind-paced 90 seconds.

My only other -- extremely minor -- complaint is frontman John Paul Coollett II's roar -- as visceral as it may be -- could have used a better supporting cast to provide some texture.
More than a tribute of Florida metal days gone by, The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry is a vicious resuscitation of a near-moribund sound retooled for the 21st Century.