Triptykon – Melana Chasmata (Century Media)

Triptykon – Melana Chasmata (Century Media)

What a weird year it was for Tom G. Warrior. Triptykon’s second album, Melana Chasmata, came out in April, to mostly superlative praise. A week later, Warrior slated those reviews, saying, “Melana Chasmata might be the most deficient post-Celtic Frost reunion album I have been involved in … Frankly, I personally am utterly puzzled by the extremely favorable opinions the album has garnered from most in our audience as well as from reviewers, record company, management, and fellow band members. My own stance is far, far more critical, and I have so far been unable to listen to the album as a whole.” Three weeks later, Warrior’s close friend, mentor, and collaborator H.R. Giger passed away, causing the singer to cancel Triptykon’s only scheduled US appearance, at Maryland Deathfest. Warrior offered a long, apologetic explanation, in which he included this note: “Within Triptykon, we discussed the possibility of playing the concert without me, with a close friend of ours filling in on guitar and vocals. The other members of the band did not see any merit in performing as an incomplete lineup, however.” Warrior was obviously deep in grief, but that would have been a bizarre compromise: As far as the listening public is concerned, Triptykon without Tom G. Warrior is not an “incomplete lineup”; it’s like Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds without Nick Cave. Later in the year, prior to the European tour on which Triptykon were about to embark with labelmates At The Gates, Warrior lashed out on his Facebook page, saying: “The amount of contempt I feel for At The Gates is beyond description.” He claimed At The Gates had undertaken “efforts to prevent Triptykon from performing a long-overdue headline concert in Switzerland, independent of the At The Gates tour.” He then said, “I never wanted to play the ATG/Triptykon tour in the first place. But Triptykon is a band and not a Tom Gabriel Warrior dictatorship; the decision to join the tour was a band decision.” Warrior has always been prone to melodrama, but any listener who kept up with these statements couldn’t help but apply them to Melana Chasmata. If Triptykon was a democracy whose frontman could theoretically be temporarily replaced, why was Warrior publicly trashing the band’s new album a week after its release, and semi-publicly trashing the band’s tourmates months before the tour kicked off? Had the band co-signed those statements? What did they think? Was Melana Chasmata deficient? Or was Warrior just a loose cannon? And was his loose-cannon nature essential to his art? It’s hard to separate the art from the artist sometimes, especially when the artist is telling you the art is bad; he never liked it and he never wanted to do it in the first place. But Melana Chasmata still sounds great, just as it sounds agonized and wounded and aggrieved and spurned. In fact, that’s why it sounds great. –Michael [LISTEN]