Eagle Twin - The Feather Tipped the Serpent's Scale

It bears repeating here that Eagle Twin are a heavy metal band.  I know, I know.  If you’re reading this, you already know that, but I point it out only to say that that fact alone rests at the bottom of the proverbial monolith of sound that vocalist Gentry Densley and drummer Tyler Smith create.  Hell, that compartmentalization is a damn near a footnote when you hear the first three minutes of their latest release, The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale.  The album plays like a vast trudge through an endless maze of progressive jazz fusion welded to a steel framework of some of the heaviest metal you’ll hear all year.  

The subject matter of the Southern Lord-released The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale is a story inundated with lore harkening to the ominous and foreboding underscores of the Old Testament.  The wonderful thing about lore is that its weapon of choice is change by way of time here is that Densley makes the story his own - or the serpent’s rather.  Lucifer, name-dropped in metal perhaps more than any other religious entity, takes on a different role for Eagle Twin, and it’s one that is as subtle and serpentine as the overarching theme of the record itself.   That’s the sticking point here.  Densley is a masterful lyricist, especially given such a well-ridden rode as occultism in the metal genre.  This is no recapitulation of what’s come before.  

Each track is a task not only sonically but lyrically as well and what makes The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale such a powerful record is Densley and Smith’s ability to take such an utterly dense, brilliant story and thread it through what’s come to be a sound that’s just as indefinable as it is unrelentingly heavy.  It’s a metal album that’s thought provoking not simply from the standpoint of the incomparable musical prowess of both Densley and Smith but also from the perspective of the narrative itself and how perfectly seamed it is to the devastation and yes, doom, that pour like a terrible curse from every track.  The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale is a journey for the listener, but one that comes with a viciously daunting price - it makes you think while peeling the paint off the walls with its sound.