Imperial 
Triumphant’s 
newest 
album, 
Alphaville might be the most versatile album 
of the year. To call the black metal trio strange 
would be an understatement; their latest work is 
a raging, depraved inferno that combines brutal 
death metal, jazz and even doo-wop to disorient-
ing effect. 
Despite Alphaville’s colossal battery and 
sheer weirdness, the album has its mellifluous 
moments. The constant variation in genre, tone 
and energy expertly paints a picture of Imperial 
Triumphant’s worldview — metropolitan and 
decaying, yet tangible and stimulating. 
One needs to look no further than the album’s 
vexing opener, “Rotted Futures,” to get a taste 
for the band’s verve. The song swaps feverishly 
between organic whirring, whimsical blast beats 
and a haunting, odd meter guitar riff. “Value 
established / Society elated / Alas, the eclipsing 
hour / Where our fear turns to profit” singer 
Zachary Ezrin bellows, describing consumption 
and decay as two sides of the same coin.
Mind-boggling rhythms become a crucial 
trait of Alphaville, especially in the opening mel-
ody of “City Swine” and the overpowering dirge 
of “Atomic Age.” Musical patterns are anything 
but uniform; they more closely resemble the 
erratic thuds of a Godzilla on his nightly ram-
page than even beats. The album’s perspective 
on modern existence is bruised and warped, so 
its time signatures are too.
Beyond provoking some crazed headbang-
ing and horrified facial expressions, Alphaville 
incorporates beautifully intricate melody amid 
the madness. The opulently jazzy intro of 
“Transmission to Mercury” is a breath of unpol-
luted air before the song diverges into primal 
growls and breakneck speed. Yet, the most satis-
fying aspect of the track — and largely the album 

itself — is its willingness to bring together the 
angel and the demon sitting on its two shoulders. 

The dancing brass notes eventually do return 
to “Transmission,” overlaying death metal 
drums and a dissonant choir. The record is at 
its best when it adamantly refuses to sacrifice 
one style for another. Creating an entire run-
time dedicated to these clashes in genre would 
have likely been too inaccessible for any audi-
ence. So instead, Imperial Triumphant opts for 
something more multicameral, patiently build-
ing up contrary ideas until there is no choice 
left but to fuse them. The results are short last-
ing but explosive, perhaps most successfully on 
the bridge of “Atomic Age.” This passage, a few 
ascending melodies smashed violently onto a 
wall of sonic chaos, always incites a relisten from 
me.
Predictably, another one of these exultant 
peaks arrives at the title track’s chorus, which 
can only be described as a cross between “The 
Twilight Zone” and symphonic metal. The jux-
taposition of a feeble, Vaudevillian tune over 
brazen, guttural chanting haunts me. It’s simply 
glorious, like the sun flares of a dying star shining 
through storm clouds from another dimension. 
Between Code Orange’s Underneath and 
Loathe’s I Let It in and It Took Everything, 2020 
has been a fascinating year for metal fusion. 
Alphaville fits nicely into this dynamic, despite 
being the quirkiest of the bunch. While the 
inherent barrier to enjoying such an experi-
mental release may shorten its staying power, 
Alphaville is undeniably one of the freshest 
and most challenging metal albums of the year. 
Even though listening to the entire album in 
one sitting can be an overwhelming demand, 
Alphaville is more than worthwhile.

8

The White House briefing room seethes 
with reporters. Many are confused, enraged 
and even terrified. All, though, are dead 
focused on the press secretary.
“I think we are very much still in a discov-
ery period regarding who They are and what 
They want,” she says. 
A reporter interrupts her. “These are very 
dangerous words, you understand? They? 
Them? To anyone in this country who looks 
differently, or speaks differently, or behaves 
differently? Do you see how using language 
like this, right now, could lead to more civil-
ian deaths?”
The press secretary doesn’t respond to the 
question, because Fox News butts in — “Isn’t 
it possible this is an act of radical Islamic ter-
rorism?”
So begins the apocalypse in George 
Romero and Daniel Kraus’s “The Living 
Dead.” Not with a bang, not with a whimper, 
but with the American government bun-
gling its response to a devastating pandemic, 
and fanning the flames of division at a time 
when everyone needs to pull together. Sound 
familiar? 
George Romero, who created, or at least 
finalized, the modern concept of the zom-
bie, had been working on this novel for 
decades before his death in 2017. Daniel 
Kraus, co-author of “The Shape of Water” 
novel, swooped in to finish it. The book, at 
635 pages, is thick enough to be wielded as 
a weapon if the dead do indeed walk (and 
in the last half of 2020, who knows at this 
point?). 
“The Living Dead” has a breadth Romero, 
whose films were usually low budget and 
independent, never achieved. Without need-
ing to rely on special effects, which even in 
Romero’s masterpieces weren’t always the 
most convincing, Romero and Kraus’s zom-
bies shamble through, and destroy, a wide 
range of locales all over North America. An 
aircraft carrier off the coast of California 
and Toronto’s Fort York are two highlights. 
The characters also vary in color, gender 
and sexuality, continuing and expanding on 
Romero’s interest in America’s diversity and 
how the American mainstream responds to 
it, which has been clear since his first zom-
bie film, ’68’s “Night of The Living Dead.” 
Kraus and Romero maintain a light, 
page-turning prose, with a descriptive flair, 
reminiscent of Stephen King at his best. The 
novel also has a razor sharp sense of time, 
averting the potholes that long, apocalyptic 
fiction usually stumbles into. Stephen King’s 
“The Stand,” while a masterwork, tears for-
ward as a virus destroys America, but stalls 

after the outbreak ends, and never quite cap-
tures its initial tension. Even the ever-popu-
lar “The Walking Dead” series, both on page 
and screen, loses its momentum as the nar-
rative leaves behind the horrifying intensity 
of total, apocalyptic chaos. 
“The Living Dead,” unlike its shambling 
creatures, rockets forward until the very 
last page. It knows when to draw out tense 
moments of uncertainty, when to explode 
in bloody horror, and when to condense and 
summarize. This helps since the narrative is 
split between a number of viewpoint char-
acters, and takes place over 15 years. When 
the virus ceases to be a threat, like in “The 
Stand” and “The Walking Dead,” things are 
no less intense since the factors that let the 
disease run rampant, America’s myriad divi-
sions, have only worsened. This book is ter-
rifying cover to cover as its plot, while full 
of the gore, bullets and ironic, sanguinary 
Romero wit fans will expect, has a crushing, 
almost prophetic relevance.
In “Night of the Living Dead,” a Black 
character survives hordes of zombies, only 
to be killed by white militiamen in the 
film’s final frame. In “Dawn of The Dead,” 
zombies are drawn to a shopping mall, and 
wander dead-eyed through its saccharine 
halls. In “Land of the Dead,” the rich live on 
the upper floors of a skyscraper, while the 
lower classes make dangerous supply runs 
to maintain their lavish lifestyles.
“The Living Dead” packs these satirical 
threads into one epic narrative, threading 
together Romero’s interests in America’s 
prejudice, consumerism, wealth gap and 
institutional failure. By doing so, it unin-
tentionally analyzes what is helping the 
COVID-19 pandemic utterly destroy Amer-
ica.
The zombie attacks begin in nursing 
homes and low income areas. Middle and 
upper class Americans ignore them as long 
as possible, and the government does not 
offer a coordinated response, instead play-
ing down the danger until the last possible 
moment. This is nothing far-fetched. As 
one character puts it, “It’s Regan laughing 
off AIDS. It’s Bush saying, ‘Mission accom-
plished.’ ” It is also Trump and his cronies 
ignoring COVID-19. 
“If our inattention is part of why this 
started where it started, and why no one can 
stop it . . . Maybe it had to happen,” another 
character laments. “It feels like we’ve been 
sleepwalking through a dreamworld we 
convinced ourselves was working just fine 
for everyone. It may be too late, but at least 
we’re waking up.”

FILM REVIEW
FILM REVIEW

ANISH TAMHANEY
Daily Arts Writer

MUSIC REVIEW
MUSIC REVIEW

ANDREW WARRICK
Daily Arts Writer

‘The Living Dead’ is a 
thrill and a warning

Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com

‘Alphaville,’ a tour de 
force of the grotesque 

ARTS

Thursday, August 13, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

