Pyrrhon - Running Out of Skin (EP) [2016]

In an alternative universe, I could have actually enjoyed records like The Mother of Virtues or Vermiis, records by two bands which pop up on occasion in my reviews since I entertain the prospect of teasing their most avid followers and acolytes by readdressing how artificially elevated they seem to be, especially when compared the bee knee's of the technical/avantgarde death metal spectrum, Canada's masterful Gorguts. That said, Pyrrhon's Growth Without End EP which came out last year was a refreshing coat of paint that fractured their immensely busybody stream of waxed, alienating notes and chord fusions into something more in tune with my ears, even though it still retained its caustic freakishness. Come 2016, I was excited to get my hands on their latest opus, Running Out of Skin, which turned out to be something less of an opus and rather a flimsy filler that obeyed the law of its titular maxim more than anything. Crafty and deracinating as these gentleman are in their approach, there is a level of versatility on this EP that I simply found unnerving, spin after spin.

And unnerving not in the most positive sense. Firstly, Pyrrhon are beyond doubt inaccessible, a feat they've already proven wit 2014's Mother of Virtues, but while complexity is certainly a characteristic, the real asset of their craft the cauterizing, unfazed attack of the guitars, the insomniac lying wait behind the thickset of instruments. Nevertheless, one reason for me abjuring this 16-minute EP is not it's dense focus on intricacy and avowed inaccessibility; it's the band's inability to employ little else that cultivates captivating musical experience. Let's take a look. ''Statistic Singular'', the opener and longest track here, broils with tense, discordant chords that weave into each other in a seeming mess, a characteristic choppy, bass-driven rhythm guitar driving a grotesque sort of groove beat while the lead guitars mingles with the fringes of utter ear-razing frippery: the intended effect IS alienation, but I'm too busy either scratching my head over what the hell is happening or waiting for a hook to give a damn about their skill. I profess: I do enjoy the simpler, plainer things in life, but the track absolutely lacks any momentum to engross anyone to a satisfying degree. As the same rule sadly applies to the rest of the disc, the quartet has apparently invested more time in attempting to emulate the philosophy of their half-sober practice sessions that actually filing any sensible flourish into the music.

But hell, if you're still pleading 'that's the whole point of the music, to sound dissonant'', be my guest. The guitar tone is unruly and boring, not a major deviation from the industrial grind of their previous records but nonetheless a degree more downtrodden, sharp high-end notes cutting at your eardrums like tiny bacteria with rusted, nail-sized cleavers hacking away in unkempt bliss.I actually enjoyed the vocals on here, though, perhaps the only single attribute that preserved some of that vile, cantankerous timbre I so loved on their previous outings - thankfully some things never change. There's something to be understood here if the best song on the whole disc is a cover of Death's ''Crystal Mountain'', surprisingly well applied into the individual, splenetic science which Pyrrhon has constructed on its own, - complete with both thicker and raspier variations on Schuldiner's voice plus tingling, cyborgian lead sections - and that's Running Out of Skin feels more like a piece of audio commitment fit for donation to poverty-stricken heshers in need, and even then I imagine a good many people wouldn't waste much tine before dumping it into the CD heap. Certainly not a 'terrible' effort by any means, but I felt that in between the dense interplay of meaningless notes and riffs some more substance would have been added, something which I hope the band will seek out to improve on their next full-length. That ''Crystal Mountain'' though.

Highlights:
Statistic Singular

Rating: 52%

Pyrrhon - Growth Without End (EP) [2015]

I could never feign to hide my affliction with most bands nowadays practicing the more modern, and more some reason more enticing ordeals of death metal, like those of Ulcerate, most post-2000 Immolation, Wormed, Fleshgod Apocalypse, or even the New York quartet Pyrrhon until this point in their career (although I have enjoyed perhaps a handful of releases in the medium) simply because much of this technically-infused, dissonant death metal feels as gratifying and appealing to me as a basket full of camel dung, and not even the pasty kind of dung, at that. That Pyrrhon underwent some inexplicable epiphany after their lukewarm ''The Mother of Virtues'', which was likewise greeted with praise and hype, seems unreasonable to me, since their latest EP ''Growth Without End'' does not seem like a huge deviation from the cancerous and bowels-out jingle of its predecessor, yet it simultaneously surprises me that the four piece could jump so far in between two chronologically very close recordings, ripping open the entrails of quality and fastidiously backing down from the oversize proportions of the full-length into a sort of formulaic greatness that translates into memorability and good song-writing, not unlike the recent EP by Ketha which I enjoyed so much.

Granted, Pyrrhon still panders to the same audience as before, but if anything with this EP they've gained new listeners, myself included. For sure, I never thought ''The Mother of Virtues'' quite felt like a godawful abortion the same way some other albums in the field did, but it's also safe to assume it will never pique my attention the way this EP did. Imagine those placid, germ-ridden excesses of afterbirth trimmed and truncated carefully, refined and polished until the work at hand still resembles the fetid grotesqueness of the initial product, but far clearer around edges, sans the overloaded carton covering that was weighing both itself and the listener's attention span down: that's ''Growth Without End''. The EP unfolds with ''Cancer Mantra'' and the band wastes no time getting to the fucking point, exploding with bombastic, wacky chords and disjointed rhythmic sways that sound unlike anything I've quite heard before, laden with dark, chaotic deliciousness. This isn't exactly the industrial and eccentric parade I discovered on Ketha's latest EP, because each musician is keeping his instrument closely intact, with little room for experimentation. That said, so much is going on here that I find it difficult not to dub this experimental. The guitars are absolutely preposterous and monstrous, and giving them props would be insulting because they've loaded the EP with so many unhinged, jagged riffs within just 15 minutes that it's nothing short of outstanding, but their discordance and the odd harmonies produced are also excellent in shaping the atmosphere, so much, in fact, that I'd easily equate pretty much any of the 5 brief songs here to a Deathspell Omega under the influence of Gorguts or Ulcerate.

The drums are absolutely ballistic, unpredictable, but at the same time sporadic so you're getting more of a great jazzy vibe rather than a pointless clangor of cymbals, toms and snares. The vocals, of course, deserve a mention here, since they can seamlessly shift between deep Immolation-esque growls and more rampant punk/hardcore inflections, like on ''Cancer Mantra'', to a timbre that lies in between the two, some underlying inherent evil seeping through the clot of a complex, mercurial cellular expanse, which, like the unpredictable instrumentation keeps changing, resurfacing and morphing as though in a rehearsal. Seriously, ''Growth Without End'' is not for the weak. The strength of the songs lie in their brevity, with the longest track (''Turing's Revenge'') being about 4 and a half minutes, and the shortest two, at 2 minutes and 1 and a half  minute respectively, being so concise that I couldn't help filter them through my unsuspecting auditory system over and over until my ears were in tatters. Everything here is so damn acrobatic and yet muscular that it leaves nothing behind. Sure, I could have supplanted some of the completely disorganized chord swells like those toward the end of ''Turing's Revenge'' for something equally captivating and energized as the other songs on the EP, but I'm more than willing to forgive a few stains on a 15-minute listen that already struck home far and wide, destroying my expectations. So much, in fact, that now I'm willing to give their full-length a second chance. Even the lyrics are pure gold, concerning various subjects, from history to mental deterioration, and they help tie up ''Growth Without End'' into the perfect cradle of malice to which belongs, fostered by oozing depravity and cancerous carbuncles, until, I hope, they all implode and give birth to something of even greater stature. Well done.

Highlights:
Cancer Mantra
Forget Yourself
The Mass

Rating: 85%

Incinerate - Eradicating Terrestrial Species [2015]

The breeding ground for uncouth 90's death metal has grown more popular than it was during its heyday as a myriad outfits continue their mechanized, bloody advance to claiming their testators' legacy (i.e. Suffocation, Cryptopsy, Morbid Angel, etc.) but fruitfulness in such endeavors has rarely been the case. In other words, enter the dialectic of Incinerate third record ''Eradicating Terrestrial Species'', and the testy death metal listener will instantly realize that he/she has already run the gamut of the band's cadaverous gestalt of brutal/technical death metal, with almost zero new tricks to satisfy the culinary appetite which one may have hoped ravish. Playing like a manic, defunct tutorial for disfiguring ugly extra-terrestrials, this international cooperation leaves much to be desired, (Dave Rotten and Rogga Johansson created some of the most ill-bred sonic abuses of recent history with ''Macabre Kingdom'' in 2012, and we all know what a blast that was) but less to be acquired...

Comatose Music has had the honor of governing such depraved and bombastic retro-90's death metal acts like Incinerate, though the department's been generally running low on originality. Incinerate plucks at the strings of Hate Eternal, Cryptopsy, Suffocation, Florida obscures Brutality and Disincarnate and Immolation more than the cavern-core worship bands these days usually vie for, and even the production values have been altered somewhat to patch in with that gruesome production of the 90's. Before I gone on to scold how much this record lacks proper clinical galvanization, let me point out that the 90's mechanics are perfectly in place, and the riffs are densely punishing enough to come close to the aforementioned groups, with dredged up technical punishment and furious tremolos delivering most of the album's fundamental butchery, and treacly chugs gulping away at the listener's ear with systematic tension and ugliness.The drums contain enough fills and frenetic double-bass convolution to sound tantalizing, at least to an extent; add to that a metallic, grinding base line and everything seems in place to become the bonafide tech-death offering of the year, but the tracks are so interchangeable that it feels like musical equivalent of dull paint job.

I frankly enjoyed the overt presentation of gore, religion and science-fiction tropes, but aside from the few cheesy film sequences sandwiched in between or before some of the tunes, the concepts did nothing for the theatricality of the album. Incinerate is constantly technical, but they obdurately lack the quality to modify themselves throughout the record. Jesse Watson's vocals are the typical growls you were expecting, providing little anguish or trauma. They go excessively deep sometimes, and the cavernous lows mixed with the unsavory technicality generate something of a Demilich current, but once again, pleasure is stifled. Perhaps my favorite track here was ''The Berzerker'', which sounds characteristically similar to all the other tracks but has a intro featuring Shelley's poem ''Ozymandias'' as the only moment which was elevated to auditory limelight in the entire song. This is 30 minutes of unscathed brutality that feels long enough after the first spin. Evocative? I doubt it. Pure calculated ordure, and a fine piece to listen while you're raging over your maths project, I imagine. Yet this scarcely pushes the imaginative expanse of anyone's mind, and I certainly enjoyed some of the surgical guitar work and intensity, I won't hesitate to say Incinerate's got a better compendium of cult horror/sci-fi films than masterful riffs.

Highlights:
Fucking the Rotten Nun
The Bezerker
From Distant Worlds

Rating: 50%

Deivos - Theodicy [2015]

Poland has proven over and over again that it simply will not endure a lag in the standards of its death metal. The country has, beyond the universal acceptance of Vader and Behemoth, housed a myriad explosive death metal acts trenchant in some of the most brutal, hammering trends the 21st century has yet to offer, displaying skill, technicality and pulverization on all grinding fours with bands like Lost Soul, Decapitation, Calm Hatchery, and most lately, Deivos, whose 2010 opus ''Gospel of Maggots'' blew me straight out of the water for the phenomenal cultivation of this stylized form of sonic smashing that it was. Naturally I found such a dynamic compendium of brutality as a fresh breath of air from the humdrum of other death metal banalities in the business. Come 2015, though, I was excited for a new wave of shattering guitars, but the result was not exactly what I had in mind...

...that's to say the Poles' latest ''Theodicy'' isn't a far shout from its predecessors, and there I certainly cannot voice any complaints, but it didn't instill me the extent that the sophomore did either. All of a sudden these benefactors of brutality have turned oddly... metallic. They always bore some impregnably systematic sound to their bashing guitars and non-stop drumming, but hell, even the cover art's morphed from a beautiful portrayal of their music with vividly insane color palettes and artistic rapture to some grey and dry dust bowl with skeletal goat horns and an equally uninteresting title font. I'm not one to evaluate art, but that shit looks like they had to borrow an amateur artist the last second or had to design the cover themselves (the latter is more reassuring). Either way,  everything about this record is up for the brutal/technical contingency, except for the dynamics. As always, the riffs are abundant and crushing, a slew of hammering torpedoes and lethal chords and tremolos coming right at the listener's ear drums like riffs taking off the maw of a motherfucking whale. That's how heavy this is. Unfortunately, the Poles can't reconcile the blandness of the texture with 39 minutes of mindless fisting.

''Theodicy'' stores nothing of genuine, hooking worth except perhaps the shock value of the riffs, which admittedly, even at this dry stage, are staggeringly well constructed, proggy but punishing mutes delivered in staccatos, spiked with pinch harmonics here and there. The band somehow tries to flavor their sound with oddly dissatisfying, yet thankfully short experiments which generally create an overriding industrial motif. There are clinks and clicks, odd buzzes, but the listener is completely unaware of their destination and purpose, (so too is the reviewer) and some of these quaint ambient sounds like those at the end of ''Amor Sui'' are decidedly taken from the sound of a train just before leaving. This isn't a train station dammit! It's a fucking death metal record! I am grateful for some individual riffs which grappled my attention, and the vocal delivery of Angelfuck is not bad, if anything, preserving the 'death' in death metal in a record which I felt had run its course by the time I had spun it the third time.

Is Deivos skiving its duty? How come ''Theodicy'' didn't rule like its precursors? The answer may be startlingly anticlimactic, but it's probably no surprise that the Poles ran out of fuel after ''Demiurge of the Void'' and ''Gospel of Maggots'', but that's not to say it's a terrible record, in fact it can still kick some ass on rare occasions(the bass lines on ''Parasite'' stand out rather marvelously), and some serious ass provided you're one to drool all over this musical niche in particular, and it's definitely still undiluted Polish death metal with its roots in the best sort, but I'd rather bang my head to some Vader or Decapitation and immerse myself in a wonderfully sonorous clusterfuck.

Highlights:
Parasite
El Shaddai

Rating: 57,5%

Fallujah - The Flesh Prevails [2014]

It's a shame that absurd math-metal and deathcore hyper-guitar playing ceased to be the prerogative of a chosen few and has now turned into this overripe leitmotif that everyone seems to carelessly abuse. Translation: the technical death metal universe, like all the other sub-genres, is threatened by a lack of originality and excessive boorishness. It's become so hard to find a band with genuine, enduring appeal that one's hopes can disintegrate withing mere hours of internet and archive browsing. The statement can be true within various degrees in accordance to your personal level of pessimism, but that seems to be the big story in today's metal market nonetheless. We are fortunate enough to bands like Fallujah whose intrusion with ''The Flesh Prevails'' was more than just delightful, but simultaneously upraising to the genre at large. ''The Flesh Prevails'' is my first experience with the Californians, and while it has garnered a surprising amount of attention by topping its apparently less impressive predecessor ''The Harvest Wombs'', for me the record has proven to be an un-fucking-believable celebration of how much good music can fill our wazoos with streaming pleasure.

There is no pretension. Fallujah may have the undivided attentions of Cynic, Necrophagist, Decapitated and the like, but in essence it is certainly much more than the sum of its parts. While Fallujah takes obvious joy is dishing out some more simplistic, clinical chug-fests, the overriding motif certainly seems to be the jazzy melodiousness guitars that sparkle and swerve to and fro across every corner of the record with stupendous, opiate ease. Fallujah is ''technical'' enough to compete any of the fierce contenders in the field, namely Decrepit Birth, Spawn of Possession or even Cynic who takes the jazz-fusion element and molds it with the metal components to form something slightly more than a simple accompaniment, but the way the technicality is served is beautiful, even delectable. This translates into plenty of whizzing and zipping guitar notes bouncing along airily, but what serves only as a meager way to decorate bulkier riffing works as the main drive on this record. The guitars almost never feel left out at some point in the record like a bagatelle, like the way they're usually treated.

The superb sophistication of the guitars and their melodic superiority can perhaps only be matched by the timeless feat of the percussion department, with the drums beating and pummeling fresh, invigorating rhythms in a manner that balances the use of double-bass drums and more dexterous fills. But while that complement falls short of serving the drums real justice, what hits me over and over again with this record is how damnably progressive it's nature is. It would perhaps have fared better with the general build of the record if certain atmospheric chord breaks could be excluded, and the rhythm section does in general support a heavy, bludgeoning bevy of riffs that could really fit Suffocation or Cryptopsy just as well, and the guttural vocals (also excellent) are no-brainers, but fuck, there is unquestionably a good deal of progressive aspects to be found on this album. Hell, even some of the atmospheric break-downs (I do hate to call them that) or chorus sequences reek of progressive metal, infused with indescribably beautiful, though perhaps a tad zippy, hyper-math-metal sections which sound like trippy 8-bit mixes. Sure even with the inscrutable care by which the technicality is exerted, the riffs may rarely sound somewhat dull, but in exchange from being robbed senseless of your wits by a hallucinatory jazz/metal congregate that hardly seems to be a con.

The creative expanse of ''The Flesh Prevails'', and moreover, that of Fallujah, is so huge and copiously stocked with hidden booty that it feels like nearly anything could fit the album in general. It's one of those records which omits most creative deterrents and leaves itself to fall freely into the promised land. Think organs, keyboards, synthesizers or even minor orchestras moving through the currents. Yet, what makes this album even more daunting for the dismal purist is the clean voxes of both female and male vocalists that exude their influence during the aural moments where the band decides to take a concise break; elegant and beautiful, I found them to be oddly fitting to the album. And what one song would I use to define the album? ''Chemical Cave'', the one single track which conjures a myriad of images that could just be the birth place of the record had it been given to us humans by some strange alien race, in addition to being my favorite tune in the whole album. That said, ''Levitation'' and ''Sapphire'' are both stunners, crystal coves of ass-kicking, jazzy hashish, and even the experimental instrumental ''Alone With You'', a track that would arouse even the most open-minded metal aficionado, was a spectral triumph as far as I'm concerned. So with as much of the record as I could amass into one humble review, there's no reason for me to reevaluate my verdict. Folks, buy this record, and listen to it till your ears start spurting fucking rainbows.

Highlights:
Sapphire
Chemical Cave
Starlit Path
Allure

Rating: 92%

Soreption - Engineering the Void [2014]

Remember the last time overdone tech-death wankery was actually fun? I think it was about 1995-1996 when a joint of Suffocation/Cryptopsy releases ended that phase. Remember the last time death metal wasn't about how many strings you could pluck in 5 seconds or how many vocal chords you could abuse, but about the actual quality and flow of your riffs? Well, that must have been a long time ago. Granted, I understand that as an angry, frenetic teen it's hard to deprecate the brutality and the seamless conjunction of myriad guitar riffs that brutal/technical death metal has so unabashedly spoon-fed us, but so many of these bands have been hamstrung by their deliberate attempts at sounding as ornate and elliptical as possible that it's difficult to enjoy even a fraction of such material after a fair amount of spins. Double-bass drums. Pernicious, endless streams of guitar technicality. Growls deeper than powder barrels. And this is just the more ''considerate'' side of thing, folks. I haven't even mentioned the bombastic djent lovers and the whole rotten deathcore movement that allegedly (and rather unfortunately) gained its momentum from the stream of 90's tech-death masterworks...

So, based on what I just said, one might think that I'm demeaning Sweden's Soreption on their sophomore, ''Engineering the Void''. Quite on the contrary.  What attracted me to it - even if I wasn't spellbound throughout - was decisive, cohesive construction (''engineering'', if you will) of riffs that sounded a manifold times better than any random tech-death cripple unburdening its riff barrages that had been stocked ever since the guitarists could play a decent riff and the drummer an audible beat. Yes, Soreption is not redefining the optometry of technical death metal as we know it, but there's some much brilliance and adroitness to be found in the quality of the album that's nearly impossible not to bob your head in eager accord. Soreption is, not surprisingly, fueled by Decapitation, Necrophagist, Cryptopsy (though not so much by Suffocation) among a handful of other culprits, but unlike so many other attempts at aping and ripping off ubiquitous sounds their awesomeness is not confined to an initial excitement at the clobbering drums and the textured guitar explosions. The riffs here are played not just with ridiculous accuracy but with with a simultaneous grasp of the ''song'' concept; meaning they're not strewing bits and pieces of virtuoso tricks here and there - they're making a coherent, fully functioning mecha-feast of gears perpetually rolling and keeping the album's flux in motion, and with startling sordidness and raw power at that.

Unquestionably, the guitars are the leaders of this album. The moment ''Reveal The Unseen'' unfolds, sans any ambient effects whatsoever, Soreption makes its statement pretty fucking blatant. Tremolos upon tremolos leading up to semi-harmonious melody patterns leading up to further tremolos leading up to mazes of cavorting, acrobatic chug rhythms akin to Decapitation's masterful ''Winds of Creation'' form a miraculous set of riffs that, in the end, leave the listener dazzled, if not utterly awed. Soreption's guitar tone is not so unfamiliar, but it's something of an alternative to more polished textures; sounding like a rusted, vituperative collision of metallic surfaces. And yet the drums are also fully capacious to fuel the percussion of so dense a riff-maze, and there's no denying their significance. But don't the Swedes give any space for anything else? Of course they do. Tracks like ''Monumental Burden'' have injections of guitar solos as well as random atmospheric interludes. Indeed, the leads rock like hell (something Muhammed Suiçmez of Necrophagist would be proud of), but I shouldn't go without saying that Soreption's main focus is rhythm.

With tracks like ''I Am You'' or the excellent ''Breaking the Great Narcissist'', I found myself revisiting this record more than just a few times. The sheer intensity and determination of ''Engineering the Void'' makes it one hell of a juggernaut of tech-death in the year 2014 - surely one of the front runners of the genre this year. Sure, in that momentous struggle to retain balance Soreption may have undergone a few inconsistencies, and a occasional plunge into redundancy is inevitable these days, especially when you're practicing such a dexterous sub-genre of metal, but otherwise I really had no major complaints. Even the vocals of Fredrik Söderberg shine with durability and psychosis. In short, while those in favor of old school death metal will probably toss this away as a mere piece of junk, this is more than solid choice for modern death metal aficionados. So stop what you're doing right now and enter that fucking void.

Highlights:
Reveal the Unseen
Breaking the Great Narcissist
I Am You

Rating: 87%

Ulcerate - Vermis [2013]

Ever since the advent of their colossal third full-length ''Destroyers of All'', New Zealand's Ulcerate has been hailed as one of the leading augurs of the new technical death metal/post-hardcore or whatever you wanna call it movement, and I'm not sure if it was the overpraising, the excess commotion or just simply an adamant unwillingness, but I haven't listened to the lauded album to this day. ''Destroyers of All'' popped up in nearly every review blog or end-of-the-year list in 2011, channeling its imperious notoriety to the following year, and even though it was similar to the brilliant Flourish debut, or Deathspell Omega's engaging, estranged ''Paracletus'', I still didn't feel like giving it a listen. God knows why. Now, the group, hot on the heels of their cult classic, has come with yet another obelisk of ungodly, seismic tech-death, which is, to be sure, going to leave the ravenous masses drooling and ulcerated (you'll have to excuse the pun).

Maybe not so. Even though I'm fairly certain ''Vermis'' succeeded in encapsulating a certain circle of die-hard followers with wonder, I don't think it achieved half the fame of its beloved predecessor. Who knows, maybe two years changed our ever-mercurial metal society so much that the prodding, desirous sense to obtain and praise the cataclysmic, prehensile formations of that the group so seamlessly conveys didn't attract them any longer. That aside, I'll confide that I do have some serious catching up to do when it comes to post-hardcore or even the more metallic facet of this album by which so many other bands are delightfully toying with, but for all the sheer size, the megalithic density and the dark, inescapable atmosphere ''Vermis'' creates, I didn't find it quite riveting. There is a basic philosophy to this record that one could grasp from the very beginning, when ''Odium'' unfurls with tedious abandon and discomforting, disjointed riffs that I believe these technical/avantgarde metal purveyors are so well known for, stuff that I was inevitably drawn to in ''Paracletus'', but the riffs here come out in such banal, unimpressive orgies that I found myself drifting away from the album's core more and more as it tread forward, even though I was supposed to be elicited...

The busy, chaotic, brickwalled structure is something I can certainly appreciate, but apply it too often and too egregiously and it just becomes a chore to listen to. The guitars are wailing, wreathing serpents that coil like shapely buildings collapsing in a bombastic manner, the drums fairly clear and punchy, but to be honest in all the metallic tenacity of the album I only found a few moments that I enjoyed. As the notes continue to swell with the same frustrated patterns of repetition and sinewy monstrosity it feels as though the New Zealanders were deliberately poking my wounds, turning them sorer and bloodier every passing minute. I'll give it to them that the compositions are both stiff and strangely challenging, intricate as it must have taken them a great deal of time to pen them, yet, unfortunately, the intricacy of a composition, as myriad other examples have shown, does not necessarily bode well for its quality.  The fact that there were some really majestic, sweltering moments sporadically allocated across the album made me intermittently get my hopes high for the record, and the ultimate product wasn't really bad, but it wasn't all that good either. Hell, riffs like the pre-chorus passage on ''Await Rescission'' or the verse patterns on the title track were seriously titillating, even stellar builds, uproarious explosions of deluded chaos which the band unquestionably excels at. If only they had some more of those...

To add, the vocals were alright; I wasn't particularly impressed but I wasn't irritated either, in contrast to the wild fluctuations of the guitars. Like I said, ''Vermis'' is definitely not a bad album, but it feels like it's a bit stale in a world already crammed to the tits with similar material being ejaculated from countless different sources. It is, in the broadest sense, a death metal version of ''Paracletus'', - a monumental design of this particular sub-genre -  but it doesn't retain the masterwork's ability to encompass emotion and dread in so many different layers as acutely. It is, however, a highly florid if rigid output that, as said, fans will eagerly gulp up - at least if ''Vermis'' doesn't devour them first.

Highlights:
The Imperious Weak
Await Rescission 
Vermis

Rating: 65%

Hemotoxin - Between Forever... And The End [2013]

When Hemotoxin's 2012 demo, ''Divinity In Torture'' first reached my ears, it was hardly a huge appeal to me, nothing more of a technical showdown of various thrash and death metal influences crammed into one versatile package with the energy of youth exploding all over the demo. Enter 2013, though, you get the chance to be acquainted with the California death/thrashers' debut full-length, and what's truly intriguing is that by barely tweaking the main colors of previous formula, the band has managed to capture a far more diverse spectrum of riffs, a consistent assembly, thus raising the overall quality by heaps, where you'd imagine they would continue the same way. Hemotoxin have plunged right into complete tech-death/thrash territory here, and they've opened themselves a wider range of musical preferences by doing so, and they've no doubt started to harness sustenance from different sources in contrast to their previous ''Human'' era Death worship, embodying a brazen, even forlorn tinge into their technical rehash, even though the album is quite devoid of anchor.

This is still essentially a homage to ''Human'', that much is overly blatant when glimpse at their cover of ''Suicide Machine'', and you could still call this old school, spraying the listener with a bevy of churning, palm-muted tech-thrash fluctuations that should hold some appeal even to fans of purer, straightforward Bay-Area acts like Vio-lence, Metallica and Blind Illusion, but as much as ''Between Forever...'' strains to rekindle the underground love for Atheist, Death circa 1991-1993, early Pestilence or Dutch obscures Thanatos, they're inevitably malcontent with the overall technical proficiency those aforementioned bands have intact, so about a quarter of this disc belongs to a marginally more modern effulgence, say, Cynic or late  Gorguts perhaps. They're not shy in hiding their obvious influences, the Chuck Shuldiner-like inflection, polished production, and frothing, gradually culminating riff-fests that just overtly display a mesh of ubiquitous tech-death chomps and raging death/thrash affairs. The songs are fairly variant, but each manifest through an equal measure of raw excitement and less frivolous dual guitar harmonies. Hemotoxin are truly busy with everything they do, and that's what I love about this album. The absolute best song here is ''Autophagy'', which was originally released in last year's ''Divinity In Torture'' demo; a hungry, immensely prehensile palette of convoluted riffing played an grindcore-speed, so angry and stocked with intricacy that I felt I was witnessing Sinister, Vendetta, Death, Vio-lence, early Pestilence and Atheist simultaneously.

''Between Forever...'' deserves much praise, and particularly because it had no gigantic flaw. Alright, I'll confide that despite the avidity I hold for these tech-y riffs they weren't deviating from their sources, and hell, I even heard similar riffing from recent acts like Skeletal Remains, but that aside, my biggest complaint was the production values. Even though it was solid, I couldn't quite hear the drums rolling and thundering under the excessively audible wail of the guitars, as if nearly the entire meat of the album was bestowed on the chugging ferocity of the guitars, and I would have preferred some spidery hooks rather than the polished font of the record: you see, the quality of the production is more fit for something worshiping, say, Cryptopsy or Necrophagist, and the riffs aren't mature enough to bear that sort of complexity, which means a rougher, crooked crack in the production would have been a better choice, even when Hemotoxin seldom dive into utopian territory with their simultaneously epitomizing guitar harmonies.

In general, though, the Californians' product is utterly convincing, vigorous and fierce, something I'd easily choose over some of the worse efforts of the aforementioned mavens. ''Between Forever...'' sustains mobility, has an extensive range of riffs that they interpret into their own multi-dimensional contours, and despite the relatively lengthy leap it took towards more technical borders, still remains fresh with primordial, bristling anger. It's quite palpable that they quartet are still playing it somewhat safe, and they'll do wonders if they could incorporate such primal competence as they exhibited here into an even busier ebullition of tech-death avidity. Easily recommended for fervent tech-death/thrashers of any sort - if you enjoy any of the labels above then you'll have no problem liking this.

Highlights:
Autophagy
Divinity In  Torture
Confined To Desolation

Rating: 85%