Imperial Triumphant – Lexington Delirium

Going from Brooklyn to Manhattan, Jel keeps us up-to-date on metal…

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[7.17]Jel Bugle: This is my kind of jam — a bit of cosplay, black metal groove, jazzy rhythms, spoken bits, all building to a hypnotic crescendo. I like songs that go somewhere. This is one of the more accessible songs from their Goldstar album.
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Tim de Reuse: It’s hard to do interesting things with a guitar/bass/drumset these days, but Imperial Triumphant’s technique (play with delicate precision, in lockstep with one another, over compositions bizarre enough to defy quick analysis by even the most polyrhythm-headed theory wonk) continues to deliver. Vocalist Zachary Ezrin’s emissions are less a “growl” in the death metal tradition and more of a wide, hollow choking sound, evoking not aggression but the croak of an entity that’s been around too long. The way they overlay death metal set dressing onto a heroic melody, buoyed by brass and bright, sparkly production; it evokes a dull, warped Americana, an anti-anthem. Though it’s not as technically astounding or expansive as some of their back catalogue, it’s very, very 2025.
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Ian Mathers: One of the many reasons I find it hard to respect Sleep Token is acts like this, who show how easy it is to be a good metal band with good masks.
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Dave Moore: I like that there was no way for me to tell from the guitar intro what this song would sound like when the vocals kicked in. (In hindsight I guess the masks were a bit of a spoiler.) Maintains enough interest in the treble to manage the sludge churning underneath.
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Nortey Dowuona: The Radiator building was designed by Raymond M. Hood, co-architect of the Chicago Tribune building, and today houses the Bryant Park Hotel, established in 2001. Bryant Park itself is named after famed poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant, he of bird raps and tree sweet talk. The building itself in its gold bricks contrasting its black bricks, exterior lighting and black mirrors with marble was a perfect home in 1924 for the American Radiator Company, formed in 1892 after the merger of three heating companies: Michigan Radiator, Detroit Radiator, Pierce Steam Heating Company, with the addition of the St Louis Radiator Manufacturing Company, the Standard Radiator Company of Buffalo and Titusville Iron Company. But now American Radiator is no more, having become American Standard in 1948, Bryant himself having died in June 1878 long before in a fall during his dedication to Giuseppe Mazzini, and Hood himself passed on August 1934. And yet I, born 1996, a year after this gem was written by Tomas Haake, have walked past this building for work for a year and 3 months, still crowned by its gold paying respect to the black. Time passes us all by, no matter what we sketch, write and assemble, the only things left behind are boilers with 4 leaf clovers.
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Alfred Soto: Stopping short of brutalism, “Lexington Delirium” goes slow to fast triumphantly if not quite imperially.
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