Band:	Cyborg Octopus
Album:	Bottom Feeder
Style:	Metalcore, Progressive metal
Release date:	September 27, 2024
A review by:	musclassia

01. The Righteous Waves
02. Afterburner
03. Dreamkiller
04. Cyborg Octopus
05. Midas
06. Missed Call
07. A Void Disguise
08. Defective Immediately
09. Gabriel's Last Meal
10. The Trench

Cyborg Octopus’s last album was a lean, exciting, genre-hopping bonanza; coming two years after, Bottom Feeder is arguably a bit less of all those adjectives.

Between The Light And Air was, at only 33 minutes, a fairly brief follow-up to a debut record that had been released six years prior, and the ways in which it jumped between metalcore, melodeath and progressive metal (plus a brief surf rock detour) with relative abandon made it seem swifter still. There are elements of each of those genres (aside from the surf rock) on Bottom Feeder, but it does perhaps feel like the band are starting to consolidate into a more consistent style across a record, particularly with this album being several minutes longer than its predecessor, while also veering away from their past dabblings with non-metallic styles. There are some upsides and downsides to this, but if such consolidation represents maturation, it’s a respectable maturation for the Californians.

Like its predecessor, Bottom Feeder does kick off with a song closer to metalcore than any of the other styles; “Old Stories” from Between The Light And Air had quite a classic Killswitch Engage-esque metalcore style, and “The Righteous Waves” from this album still has more old-school elements, particularly in the guitar melodies, but there is more of an orientation towards modern djentier metalcore on Bottom Feeder that can be heard in hints on this first track. Overall, however, the solid melodicism across the song wins out, particularly in some of the later keyboard flourishes.

In my review of Between The Light And Air, I do remember highlighting one track in particular for a successfully emotive clean vocal-driven section. The vocals have drawn my attention while listening to Bottom Feeder, but for less positive reasons. The harsh vocals are a mixture of growls and high-pitched shrieks, and I do find the latter style to be draining at times on this album; however, it’s the semi-clean gruff vocals on the album that really tend to detract from songs. There’s a first appearance from them on “Afterburner”, and I find them to be particularly rough here; what’s more, there seems to be a slight slip with the production on this track, as a moment where these gruff vocals are backed up by djenty chugs, I get a sense of the music becoming a tad muffled. The song overall is still relatively fun, but there are concerns sneaking in while listening at this point of the record.

In contrast, there’s also more melodic clean singing used at several points on the record, such as one the melodeath-oriented “Cyborg Octopus”, and this eponymous song works out pretty well; the up-tempo melodeath sound comes across well (particularly with the power metal-style cheesy keyboards), the cleaner singing sounds better than the gruffer vocals, and the solo and breakdown in the latter stages round it out nicely. The keyboards and synths across the album are a consistent highlight for me, whether it’s the catchy, trancey synth sounds kicking off the jittery metalcore track “A Void Disguise” or the cool synth and keyboard parts lighting up “Gabriel’s Last Meal”.

When I discussed earlier that Cyborg Octopus seemed to be consolidating musically on this album, there is still some variety; see, for example, the hectic technical metalcore freneticism of “Defective Immediately” followed right afterwards by the galloping melodic metalcore of “Gabriel’s Last Meal”. I do find that the more melodic aspects of this record seem to be more engaging, at least for me, but what I really miss are the curveballs on the previous album, whether it be the random sojourn into surf rock, the dabblings in more proggy songwriting, or the unexpected saxophone cameos. There is a saxophone cameo on the final song, “The Trench”, and this is the one place where the band do clearly mix up the formula; it starts off as a soft, sad piano ballad, before bringing the saxophone in for a big emotional intro build-up, something that gives me the kind of vibes you’d expect from a grandstand emo/post-hardcore song. The track stays slow and important throughout, and it’s a sound that probably won’t work for everyone, but I’m open to metalcore bands going all-out emotional at the end of an album provided it’s done well, and “The Trench” broadly works for me.

Overall, I do prefer the previous album by some marging; I find the vocals to be frustrating or off-putting at times here in a way I never found on Between The Light And Air, there are songs that slightly underwhelm, and I do think that this album largely lacks its predecessor’s peaks. In spite of this, there is enough here that I enjoy to make the ultimate experience of listening to Bottom Feeder to be a positive one, albeit one with reservations.