Space-themed metal has always been popular. One could argue that an interest for the cosmos was already a thing in the very beginning with Black Sabbath's “Planet Caravan” (yeah, that song is not metal, but then again, a big chunk of Overspace & Supertime isn’t either). In the 80s we had Voivod, who pretty much set the blueprint for bands that wanted to dive deep into sci-fi themes. As metal got more extreme in the 90s, we got the likes of Nocturnus to lead the way and for later bands like Mithras, Darkspace, Oranssi Pazuzu, and Vektor to follow and expand the sound palette even further. Nowadays we have the most obvious example in Blood Incantation, with Absolute Elsewhere still very fresh in our minds.
All this walk down memory lane is not arbitrary. Cryptic Shift does borrow sounds and concepts from all these bands (maybe not from Darkspace, although the running times are equally gargantuan!). Like many of you I’m sure, I discovered Cryptic Shift through their debut album, Visitations From Enceladus. These six years in between have undoubtedly meant a lot for these guys. I seem to remember how I thought their timing was so unlucky with Covid lockdowns certainly not helping in getting their name out there. During this time, Cryptic Shift has turned the knobs on everything up to eleven.
If you thought their songwriting skills were already impressive with their debut with a 25-minute-long opener, then you are not ready for the colossal tracks on Overspace & Supertime. With 3 tracks around the 10-minute mark and two monoliths of 20 and 30 minutes respectively, this album is not a mere soundtrack to a sci-fi film, it’s the whole damn movie. The progressive and jazzy interludes are expanded in greater detail. It would be easy to say “Pink Floyd but death/thrash”, but it is far more nuanced than that, and projects like Morbus Chron and Sweven come to mind.
In many ways I would say this is better structured than the latest work by Blood Incantation. The level of cohesiveness is much higher with every section, calling forth the next one in a more fluid way. You’ll experience soothing sections that evoke visions of astronomical exploration, followed by the suspense created by the dissonant guitar wails until everything comes crushing down with light-speed riffs and drums to paint a very vivid picture of intergalactic warfare. The vocals are another highlight, as Xander Bradley has expanded his technique; whereas the previous album focuses mostly on death metal grunts, here we also have clean vocals, thrash/hardcore gang vocals and robotic effects that add a lot of variety.
Is the album too long? Hell yeah it is. But I do not think too much about it. I can understand if people have trouble with the running time, but to say that this affects the memorability of the record is to miss the whole point of the record, I would say. The memorability of Overspace & Supertime lies in how much there is to discover, which makes me want to return to it again and again to find all the details there are to this journey. It took me a couple of listens to isolate different vocal passages or the theremin performed by Mike Browning from Nocturnus. Sometimes I drift off in the same way as when I watch a sci-fi epic for the eleventh time; every time I regain focus, I hear something intriguing happening, and Cryptic Shift are damn consistent in keeping that interest throughout the whole album. Grab your favorite sci-fi reading material and blast off to Overspace & Supertime. An easy contender for best extreme prog metal of the year!
