“Following the uniquely progressive death(ish) trend of increasing Hippietude, Exist has slowly morphed over the years from a spacey, Meshuggah-ish prog act in the vein of Intrinsic-era The Contortionist to a Pink Floyd-ian tricky-rhythm rock, primarily, outfit.” Evolve, mutate, Exist.
“It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I heard of Exist. However, this Baltimore band has been around for over a decade, with their debut EP coming out back in 2010, and Egoiista is the group’s third full-length release. Most of the material here was conceived at the same time as the band’s last album, 2017’s So True, So Bound, and has been honed and refined over the past few years. Max Phelps is the leader here. He had a brief stint as guitarist in Cynic earlier this decade, and one can definitely hear that influence at times on Egoiista. This is a modern progressive metal album in the sense that it makes use of plenty of instrumental dynamics, and plenty of clean/harsh vocal transitions. Plenty of bands do this; not all succeed. So how about Exist?” Leggo my Ego!
“I’m surprised so many people are there early enough to see Exist, especially given that the show started at seven. Presumably, I also missed Anisoptera before them, since I will later find one of their shirts in the pit during Obscura’s set. That doesn’t matter so much to me; I’m here for the first show of what is likely the best tech death tour that the US will see for a decade, hand picked by the big shots in Obscura. Beyond Creation, Inferi, and tucked into the middle, Archspire. What a time to be alive.” Death in Oakland.
“Most people can’t, for one reason or another, split their talents and passions into two separate wholes. The pizza place near my home in Ontario makes good wings, but they’re not great enough to start up a separate wing business and succeed, so they just do both at once. Some folks are terrible salespeople, so they invite you over to their place to eat some pizza and have a “party” while they try to pitch you an energy drink-based pyramid scheme; the free pizza is supposed to make up for the fact that they couldn’t sell icewater in the Sahara Desert, I guess. Germany’s Defeated Sanity are not most people. They happen to like ultra-brutal death metal and the old Florida proggy death scene, so instead of just combining the two they up and did a split with themselves.” Schizoids are never alone.
