With their olden Latin ligature scripted name and the album artwork, I first assumed this Portland Oregon based quartet were going to be playing that cavernous metal ov death style. Then I got rather excited seeing that three of them had previously been in Blood Freak and the drummer in Lord Gore and got ready for some Autopsy ridden gore grind nastiness. It seems around the time of their self-titled debut a couple of years back the band themselves were referring to themselves as playing traditional melodic death with blackened sensibilities so I pressed play not knowing what to expect and to be honest got nothing that had been suggested. In my mind Ænigmatum play stylistically a much more complex form of tech death and for those wondering how many sub genres one form of metal contains, well the answer is pretty much here, they go on and on and can be pretty difficult to determine especially for outsiders looking in.
I have to admit tech-death is not my favoured listening choice so it was obvious that ‘Deconsecrate’ was going to have its work cut out to impress. The first thing I noticed was the presence of the percussion and the drum roll that almost instantaneously starts the album off. To say there are a lot of these trademark signatures throughout the playing time would be an understatement and they come thick and fast, too many of them to actually count. I was reminded a little of Akercocke here and could not help thinking it sounded a bit like someone had pitched blast-beast David Gray of said outfit down a very large rocky mountain in a barrel. Still sticksman here Pierce Williams drives the pace impressively and never lets things stand still for a second. Next, we have the growly rasps of Kelly McLaughlin to contend with, they do the job but as the album progresses it is obvious there is not a huge amount of diversification in them. Still if summat is not broken there’s little point in fixing it. He is also busy concentrating on the gymnastic guitar raptures along with Eli Lundgren too and between them they keep an incredibly tight and controlled reign on things and allow the music to twist and turn in an incredibly complex fashion that has a mathematical and algebraic flair that someone who doesn’t play music and indeed isn’t the best at maths is going to find themselves confounded by. As I have named most of the band, something I don’t often do, props must also go to bassist Brian Rush. Some forms of music give his instrument short shrift, certainly not here though as it combines effortlessly with the other elements to densely meander and even at points add some rhythmic jazz laden motifs to the music.
I haven’t named any songs and frankly I don’t feel a great urge to, apart from a brief instrumental interlude which would on vinyl mark the start of side b) everything fluidly charges through the paces in a head-spinning and dizzy fashion. Still, it’s not utterly confounding and not something I could say is too much a case of showing off, a problem I have with much of this type of stuff. Indeed, by the time you have given this 4-5 spins you might be starting to get somewhere with it and things might start gelling together.
Basically, this isn’t too bad at all and not half the chore I thought it might be when I started playing it. However, I reiterate that it’s not fully my bag and tech-heads may well want to add another mark or so to the score.
(7/10 Pete Woods)
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