Overview
Today I am listening Trivium’s first studio album “Ember to Inferno”. This album was released October 14, 2003 through Lifeforce Records. It is pretty impressive to hear an album with the vocalist Matt Heafy only being 17 years old. And the other members are not much older either!
Song Analysis
Leading us into the album, the song “Inception: Bleeding Skies” is a trippy sounding instrumental piece. The beginning of the album is quite interesting and sound dramatically different from the rest of the album. Following we have “Pillars of Serpents”. Immediately it leads you right into riffs that give you no choice but to bang your head. Unfortunately I have to resist that desire to headbang since I have a concussion hahaha. This song is quite the opposite of the first track.
The song “If I Could Collapse the Masses” contains the lyrics “To rely on the hand that still feeds you, suffocates all that you could have to set yourself free”. I find these words deeply relatable in my current state of life. I have chronic illnesses that are causing me to be more dependent than I would like to be and I am working hard on breaking that cycle.
The title track of the album, “Ember to Inferno” has some pretty strong lyrics. It sounds like it is describing the beginning of anything incredible. Everything starts off small, with time and proper nurturing, whatever it is can turn into something amazing and unstoppable. So a small ember turning into an inferno is a more fiery way to explain it. This song has a cool guitar outro too.
“When All Light Dies” has very dark lyrics about abuse, you can really feel the pain being channeled through the words. It’s the kind of lyrics that make you want to hug the writer. This song has some pretty gnarly shredding toward the end. Fading into the next song, the album ends with the instrumental “A View of Burning Empires”, which is very similar to the first track on the album. The album leaves you with a sense of pain from “When All Light Dies”, since “A View of Burning Empires” playing after it sounds pretty dreary. It nearly gives me goosebumps and a sinking feeling in my stomach.
Final Thoughts
The thought I have while listening to this album is that the following albums will get better and better. It was a very solid first album from Trivium. There were a lot of aspects about this album and the way they all performed that make me look forward to what will come next!
This article was originally posted on my Medium blog and has since been edited.
