“The forefathers of death metal were truly spoiled when it came time to come up with a kick-ass band name. The genre’s progenitors ran wild with synonyms for various acts of violence and bits of viscera (not to mention those nerds who pulled inspiration from Warhammer 40k), but when the thesaurus has fallen to tatters, where does a budding young death metal band pull its inspiration from?” How about Proust?
“Not to be confused with skindrone dot com (a website promoting “5 Proven Home Remedies for Seborrheic Dermatitis on the Scalp”), the Skin Drone of interest here turns out to be a tech-death group from Massachusetts/Arkansas. Formed by Bluntface Records founder Otto Kinzel, Skin Drone fuses traditional tech-death with blackish avante-garde—the latter flavorings being the most interesting.” Why isn’t there a band named Seborrheic?
“Being old means you keep a lot of crap and not just what’s clogging your colon. I still have the issue of Unchain the Underground (as referenced in my last review) where I lambasted Voivod’s Angel Rat, an album that was like a poison-tipped arrow to my heart of steel at the tender age of 16.” The man has been lambasting since before some of you were eating.
“What now?” That’s the question Akróasis, unfairly or otherwise, is supposed to answer. Obscura in 2016 is solely within the hands of founder, guitarist, and vocalist Steffen Kummerer. With the core of the band as we knew it between Cosmic Genesis and Omnivium gone—and that’s an impressive list: Hannes Grossman on drums, Jeroen Paul Thesseling on bass, and Christian Münzner on guitars—Akróasis is a moment for a new statement of intent.
“Gomorrah struck like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Slated for a mid-January release date on the not-exactly-major-label Test Your Metal Records, The Haruspex got overlooked in an administrative snafu. As luck would have it, I am nothing if not diligent about my hoarding of new music. And when I popped Gomorrah’s The Haruspex on I knew that we’d missed something good.[1. On the topic of haruspices, I need to fire mine, because I didn’t know this was coming out.] I put out a general alert to the staff, trying to get someone to review this very-nearly-overlooked record and in the time I was waiting I’d managed to listen to it twice.”
“When you think about globalization, and by extension the internet, you either think of it as the bee’s knees or just another plan of the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to control humankind. Whichever it is, such processes are almost beyond reproach when it comes to the way they’ve exposed us to a whole new dimension of quality music from all around the Earth that would have remained “underground” and in complete anonymity 20 years ago.” And that brings us to sunny Costa Rica for some tropical tech-death.
“Unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I’ve rarely been moved by Steven Wilson’s music. With notable exceptions, Porcupine Tree’s studio work put me to sleep. Nor, I must admit, was I a fan of Insurgentes or Grace for Drowning at release. Despite having long been harangued for being an Opeth fanboy, I could not get into Storm Corrosion. In fact, if you’d asked me 5 years ago, I would have said that Steven Wilson’s genius is the ways in which he makes other bands sound incredible. That changed for me, however, with The Raven Who Refused to Sing from 2012. So when I heard that Wilson had a new record coming, I was intrigued: would it keep up the momentum and style of The Raven?” Well, can it?
For those who don’t know Hannes Grossmann, you probably do know the bands he’s been involved in. He’s got Obscura, Necrophagist, and Blotted Science on his “list of things that make me cooler than you,” and one can only guess that The Radical Covenant is the Obscura record we would have gotten if Grossmann hadn’t decided to quit. And while I’m a fan of Obscura, I felt the band nailed it with Cosmogenesis and I’m not a huge fan of 2011’s Omnivium (anymore). Ironically, Grossmann said in his parting message from the band that the musical difference between he and founder Steffen Kummerer was the reason that he left the band. Apparently Kummerer was more invested in a Cosmogenesis sound, which could leave one expecting, then, I shouldn’t like this record as much…
Technical death metal. You know the images and sounds those three words conjure up: endless sweep arpeggios, slapped bass with only the freshest of strings, fast double-bass drumming, an album cover that utilizes colors on the cooler side of the Color Wheel (mostly hues of purple and blue) and has an alien somewhere in it, the band logo in a sharp, nigh-symmetrical font…. And for the most part, you know what to expect when someone tries to take the throne from the likes of Decapitated, Gorguts, or Necrophagist. We’re all about the Color Wheel here at AMG, but only the cool side. We also appreciate some good tech-death. Does this qualify?
Tech death is a fickle mistress. Madam X is our less fickle mistress of evil, debasement and death. Join her as she examines the techy, deathy strew cooked up by Kamikabe. It doesn’t sound all that appetizing, does it?
