There are a number of bands that are much more metallic than San Francisco’s Botanist and that have been denied entrance into the Encyclopaedia Metallum. Bands that are heavy and slow, or distorted and fast. Bands with dudes in short hair, sleeve tattoos, stupid haircuts and white belts. Bands with girls in their line ups and melodic breakdowns in their shitty music. Bands with screamers and with musicians that can barely be described as such. There are bands that are borderline hardcore and borderline metal that have been denied their presence in Metal Archives. That is unfair. And it is especially unfair because San Francisco’s one man project Botanist has been accepted into the database. The truth is Botanist may be black but it is not metal at fucking all.
Unless of course, to be metal one needs only have the vocals down. The Botanist, the man behind Botanist, adopts a froggy approach. His voice is small and thin, reduced by the lack of production of this recording. If vocals like this were ever meant to be eerie, this fails. If they were meant to be creepy, this jumps into comical territory.
One aspect that could have helped Botanist entrance into Metal Archives is the drums, which to be honest, are very well-played, dexterous and articulate. That is to say, there is speed and gusto. There is taste in the arrangements and enough fills and changes to color any heavy band. The sound of the drums is an entirely different matter; it is highly doubtful that an actual drumkit was used in the recording of I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose from the Dead. It is more likely that The Botanist had to downsize to drumming pads.
Which takes us to our last paragraph; there are no guitars, nor bass. There is no distortion. No heaviness. No solos. And nothing that you as a metal fan may have come to love and treasure, precisely because the strings tend to be the instruments that drive and fuel metallic music. Instead, The Botanist employs a dulcimer. Yep, you got that right.
Label Tumult says this is ‘eerie, buzzing and baffling, drum and dulcimer driven eco-terrorist black metal’. They got the baffling part right but they got the metal part wrong. There is nothing in this recording that will terrorize you. The overall sound is small and though energetic, The Botanist ultimately delivers an album that is closer to sweet than to anything black, smoked or even brown. This is precisely how one imagines latter day Emperor would have sounded like in the dressing room and after someone had instructed them to keep it down. It’s a shame because the logo is pretty cool.
Official Site
Written by Ignacio Brown
