This is my first stint with this band. the albums opens with a lot of density to it. There is some sonic breathing but the very raw production makes me feel like I'm crammed into a crawl space of the ship in Event Horizon as " Beneath The Sea Of Tranquility" unfolds. Like Ulcerate and Gorguts the trend to marry atmosphere with this dark technical brutality continues here. Like most albums of this ilk the fact you are being hit with this degree of heaviness catches you from the onset of the assault and the band find the challenge to keep you engaged from their as heaviness alone numbs you out and loses its effect
They was no time hitting the threshold and blast into " Influence Through Ritualistic Projection" it morph into a slightly off time accent that doesn't strike me as capturing the mood of any ritual but is a different take on death metal. It takes an Electro-Stimulated Hallucinatory Response to generate more variety then the straight up snare wanking. Though to have the term psychedelic thrown around so much in regards to their sound there is no a lot of cerebral window dressing . The leads are noisy and chaotic like Kerry King on some bad acid but three songs in it's as trippy as it gets.
The riff to Mother Of Toads hops around with an ugly distortion. The jazz like break down midway is pretty cool as well as the King Crimson spazz out putting this on the more progressive side of psychedelic. Fittingly one of the darker more intense moments where this album shines is Obsidian Sun. Where the manage to strike a balance of being as sonic as they are metal , though the scales are tipped in favor of metal . There angular pound of Cosmic Triangular Communications gets the point across. The opening riff is pretty cool and proggy for death metal , but you know my rule cool riffs alone don't make a song. This where I run into problems with a lot of death metal. The growls here are low mixed growls that vary slightly so they aren't monotone but its clear the vocals are where the least amount of thought was given.
They pick up to an even more blinding speed on Gibbering Hordes Of Zemiath, which I get is fast and we have layers of diddling guitar over it but is this a song or a riff ? when it slows to the crazy wonky riff I'm more of a fan as the faster parts are precise yet still trip over themselves. They don't come to their senses on Bio-Engineered Molecular Abnormalities, in fact the keep up the crushing speed only making little weird guitar sounds for a few seconds, which is far from breaking the boundaries they seem to think they are and we reach the numbed out state where the fury loses its power and becomes white noise, but to their credit they made it to the last song before this occurs. I'll give this album a six but if you like middle of the road tech death metal you might want to round it up to a 7.
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