Dayton, Ohio’s Mouth of the Architect was a post-metal lover’s wet dream when they came on the seen. The Midwest quintet fell into the same bucket as Isis, Pelican, and Intronaut but came out swinging with a sound and fury all their own. They managed to merge beautiful, landscaped instrumentals with scalping, scraping weaponry refined to a point on their 2004 underrated debut Time & Withering.
The record itself is four 10+minute stories that ebb and flow like ocean waves before, during, and after a storm. The thing that is striking about the record in general is that the band plays as one continual moving force. There isn’t one out of the group that completely takes over the momentum, they move like mud sliding down the side of a mountain, and it is about as wonderful as it gets.
So wonderful, in fact, that 13 years later, Their record label Translation Loss Records, decided to remaster and rerelease the album in its entirety on vinyl. The guitars are crisp, the vocals come through, and the drums fill the void on the remaster. The vinyl will come in two colors including Oxblood (limited to 300 copies) and a Metallic Silver and Oxblood Merge with heavy Black Splatter (limited to 200 copies). Remastered by Chris Common, Time & Withering has stood as one of the best metal records of the early 2000’s and with the newly remastered version, has come screeching back into consciousness.
