I really like The Wakedead Gathering. I’ve reviewed their previous work, notably their 2016 masterpiece “Fuscus: Strings of the Black Lyre” and their 2017 split with Ecferus. They’re a tricky band to review mind you, as they straddle so many different musical genres at once, and don’t seem to give a jot for the tropes of other genre bands. What’s most impressive is that this is essentially – as far as I can tell from the deliberately mysterious information out there – a one man band. Quite remarkable.
Parallaxiom tells a dark science fiction tale within its ten-song run time. As before, there’s a whole foundation built on oppressive and cavernous death metal, but there are lots of other ingredients in this sonic concoction this time round. So yes, there are thrash moments (particularly in some of the drumming), and some black metal riffing here and there between bouts of excruciatingly crushing doom. The most prominent of the influences to be found here? It’s Voivod.
Now, not every track is going to have you scratching your head trying to remember the influence, but for me there are several moments of off the wall key changes or scronching axe work that just brought to mind the sci-fi metal masters to my head. This is not an album that simply apes the stylings of the Canadian maestros as with someone like Vektor, but the tangential shift in music as in the simply jaw dropping “The High Court of Biological Disposition” seems to me to have plenty to commend it to fans of angular, spiky extremity.
It’s also nice to hear that Wakedead Gathering are moving and evolving. Churning, complex riffs colliding with fractal soloing and writing rhythms, best shown perhaps on “Empirical Flesh”, and the muscular spasms of “Adaptive Mutation”. At times, the unexpected turns that the songs take can give them an almost jazz like feel, and while it might be a bit of a stretch to call this progressive, it’s certainly a very unusual marriage of the brutal, the primitive and the technical all at once. Even if you didn’t know that the thrust of the album was sci-fi from the name and the album cover, you’d have good grounds for guessing so from the music itself. Strangely dystopian, the metal itself gives off a dizzying, unsettling vibe.
Excellent stuff for any discerning metalhead with a nose for things new and without clear parallel. Another voyage into the unknown.
(8.5/10 Chris Davison)
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