Yessssss, hello there beautiful

Finished this with the YouTube drop from Season of Mist. This is absolutely fantastic and another W for death metal this year. If I were to compare this to anything it reminds me of a spacey Cryptopsy, but strangely with a tiny tinge of portal. I could be wrong with this comparison, but some of the blackened twisty playing reminds of some of Portal’s twisty playing. It’s definitely not as dense as portal, but it came to my mind several times while listening to this. Definitely a phenomenal death metal release and a fantastic comeback for this band. I strongly recommend it.

The production is impeccably crisp, the musicianship is magnificent, and I greatly admire their all-round performance, but tbh I'm struggling with it's whole complexity. There's a lot of ultra high speed shredding, insane drumming and all that but almost zero groove, and no where near enough to keep me hooked, on top of that, I can't get into the vocals. It's one of those instances where I want to like what I'm hearing for the sake of the high quality musicianship skills and effort put into crafting it, but I simply can't get my head around it's extremely technical structure.

It's not that I don't like brutal death in general, for instance Cryptopsy and Suffocation at least had a level of groove, but I'm struggling with alot of these modern brutal/technical death acts

Written by AndyMetalFreak on 08.07.2024 at 07:42

The production is impeccably crisp, the musicianship is magnificent, and I greatly admire their all-round performance, but tbh I'm struggling with it's whole complexity. There's a lot of ultra high speed shredding, insane drumming and all that but almost zero groove, and no where near enough to keep me hooked, on top of that, I can't get into the vocals. It's one of those instances where I want to like what I'm hearing for the sake of the high quality musicianship skills and effort put into crafting it, but I simply can't get my head around it's extremely technical structure.

It's not that I don't like brutal death in general, for instance Cryptopsy and Suffocation at least had a level of groove, but I'm struggling with alot of these modern brutal/technical death acts

Wormed have always been the unusual ones, Planisphaerium was a bit less hectic, but ever since Quasineutrality i"d say the best way to describe their songwriting is "all ideas for a whole slam album stuffed into one song"
it"s a different approach to brutal death or technical death, and you can either like it or not.
for me, this is what makes waiting 8 years for another album worth it, but i"m not surprised it doesn"t appeal to those who don"t already have a desire for something like it

Overall pretty good. Great production value, everything is well blended and pretty cohesive sound-wise despite being so hectic a lot of the time. And it's still heavy. Now that's not an easy feat.

A good amount of great brutal slam-y and technical moments, although I found some of the moments a little too disjointed and random. It started to wear me down somewhat as the second half of the album progressed. And I'm no stranger to more the more hectic and chaotic records, but I suppose it's the grindcore elements that I usually don't enjoy as much in conjunction with technical death elements, or however you want to call it.

Fortunately, the outro section of Gravitational Servo Matrix saved the day and provided a brief moment of respite, I seriously enjoyed that section. Honestly, my favorite from a single listen through of the album. I wish it was a bit longer, and grew more in intensity.

I enjoyed the vocal performance, and also going back to the production value, I liked that the vocals weren't placed too far forward. And the occasional spatial yet stutter-y effect they used on certain spoken sections was great.

Although I don't love the record, I respect it and have still enjoyed it for the most part.

Nothing new in space. Inaltered essence in Wormed