Antoine Grasser is the head honcho is this single mind project hailing from France releasing this decent debut and even getting the release on a quality label. Antoine is a musician and here he does all the guitar work, bass and drum programming but leaves the vocal performances to a raft of guests covering the nine songs he has constructed.
‘Headsplit’ kicks things off with an explosive blast via the blast beat effect and deluging riff changes which thrust the album towards the technical side of death metal. The guitar work is imbibed with a sense of superiority in the mix as the sound had me thinking about the early 90s to some degree but highly modernised to showcase the technical abilities. ‘Save The Book’ lunges in with little ceremony, its onslaught of riffs and guitar flurries ensure the track is ingrained with a controlled pandemonium that adds to the technical dexterity.
I’ll admit that parts of this album didn’t work for me, primarily because there are periods where the guitar work seems to go off on a tangent for the sake of it, rendering parts as twiddling unnecessities. It is a minor point however as I did like this album as a whole especially when you have the excellent ‘Compel’ to sink your ears into. Its brutal dirge like riff and slower drum carnage adds to the density and overall menace, blending it to a chaotic stance that enables the technical aspects of Antoine’s repertoire to be laid out fully.
That chaotic nature continues on ‘King’s Crow’ where a Cannibal Corpse like riff is unveiled before drifting into a full on assault where you feel like everything is thrown at you, then left for you to pick through the sonic bones. Same applies to ‘Triggered’ and as the track is crammed with stuff, you often hear only soundbites that could have been expanded upon, but this is not how Antoine writes his songs. Slowing down a tad is ‘Obey’ which saw the light of day as a single back in 2017, along with the opener ‘Headsplit’ I might add, and I am assuming have been rerecorded for the album. Here those technical flurries are balanced by a raft of guitar hooks as the vocals take the song into a shouting territory instilled with violence. With having so many guests on vocals there is plenty of textural variety from straight up guttural bellows to more deathcore like barks and everything in between.
‘Melt’ is the penultimate tune here, an instrumental where the drum programming adds a ton of urgency alongside the copious guitar embellishments before the release concludes with ‘Wide Open’. The instrumental flows into it right before the song deviates into some jazz infused rhythms and guitar work. As the vocals enter the track darts down blasting forays as the vocals unleash a very dense tone similar to Corpsegrinder. At times the music on this release is like Hate Eternal due to the continual contorting riffs and hooks and occasionally it sticks to straight old school death metal but one thing is sure Antoine knows how to write a technical death metal album.
(8/10 Martin Harris)
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