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Omnitron > Masterpeace > Reviews
Omnitron - Masterpeace

The Apprentices Who Found a Peace of Mind - 76%

bayern, September 10th, 2017

I’ve been pushed to listen to the album reviewed here by metalheads I know who, for some mysterious reason which continues to escape me, consider it a timeless masterpiece; in other words, it richly deserves its masterful title according to them. They’ve succeeded in making me come to terms with some bands and albums that I viewed more or less worthless in the past, but in this particular case such a change of mind is very unlikely to occur. A major reason for this stubborn stance is the fact that this effort is far from a full-fledged thrash metal recording which these folks swear it is. Yes, it does hang on the verge of thrash for at least half the time, but then we should label hundreds of other albums as thrash. If you try to sell this album as a slab of the good old thrash to a diehard fan of the genre, he/she may sever all ties with you thinking that you’re making an unapologetic fun of him/her. However, if we look at it from a broader, progressive metal perspective which is the only rightful way truth be told, then we will certainly find bits and pieces to like here.

What’s also worth of note is that the guys were one of the first genuine metal outfits on Swedish soil having started their career in the distant 1982 under the name The Krixhjalters. A string of EP’s and a full-length were released displaying the guys’ sense of humour alongside their penchant for the good old hardcore/punk hybrid which by the time the full-length came out had been replaced by a more aggressive thrash-fixated sound. There was an elusive sense of quirkiness in the music which simply couldn’t possibly remain restricted to the thrash/crossover spectre alone…

and here they were, our friends, with a new name at the dawn of the new decade, and a new approach to metal which followed the eccentric, psychedelic models established by Voivod a few years back, and ones that became instantly popular picked by quite a few bands (Transilience, Calhoun Conquer, Wrathchild America, Jester Beast, DBC, even Killing Joke if you like) in the late-80’s/early-90’s. “The Power Line” starts the show in a carefree thrash/crossover manner, sounding like a leftover from the earlier incarnation’s recording sessions, the guys spicing the proceedings with mellower insertions and goofy sing-along choruses those tools strangely recalling mid-period Skyclad, applied here way before the Brits used them to build a large portion of their career. “I Am He” is a stomping heavy rocker the gruff unmelodic vocals not very suitable to the mellow music, but “Triumph of What” returns to the faster parametres, and delivers the goods despite the couple of softer dissipations some of which include sweet acoustic breaks.

“Torque Limit” hardens the course thrashing with more verve, also changing the tempos more frequently creating delectable avantgarde atmosphere with weird bizarre riff-patterns and several interesting vocal deviations. “Eroticon” is on the opposite side of the spectre being a soft ballad, but “Lucifertility” is a notable progressive thrasher with surprising leaps and bounds, a few genuine headbanging sections, and spacey Voivod-ish trips, the absolute highlight here. “How the Steel Was Tempered” continues with the references to the Canadian auteurs the timid more aggressive rhythms “fighting” to stay alive in this sea of air-headed hallucinogenic psychedelia taken straight from “Dimension Hatross”. “Rock Drill/Iron Nation” blends twisted technical riffs with more orthodox thrashing the final result an acceptable slab of less ordinary classic thrashisms. “Five in Four” is a more melodic proposition, a power metal anthem with darker overtones, and “The Tension” releases the tension with pounding more officiant arrangements and sparse thrashy spicing, the eclectic jumpy epitaph a stylish touch. More tension released on the Motorhead cover of… let’s see who’s gonna guess it right; but of course “Ace of Spades”! Thumbs up for more originality and thinking outside the box here, the song sped up to hyper-active proportions the singer doing a really fine job to impersonate Lemmy (R.I.P.), reproducing his characteristic inebriate vocals down to the utmost hoarse detail, consequently producing his finest performance on the album.

There’s nothing to be overtly excited about here, just an above average albeit much less linear opus which by all means has its more interesting moments, taking part in the “diversification of thrash” process started by Voivod, sounding relevant to the amorphous times during which it was made. It has a handful of delightful nuances to offer the progressive metal fanbase, but even the latter may find it too out-there at times as such unconventional song-writing may not sit very comfortably with the Fates Warning, Dream Theater, Savatage, even the Psychotic Waltz lovers. It has its ties to the 70’s progressive rock movement which relied more heavily on trippy acidic configurations, and as such can’t possibly be crossed off the list as there weren’t too many practitioners back then who were mixing the more rigid metal template with more flexible psychedelic vistas. The vocals again could be another major spoiler as a more melodic, more attached, or maybe a cleaner punk-ish singer ala Snake (Voivod time and again) would have made the whole package more attractive… well, the guys weren’t serving any particular trend consciously for sure to be blamed for this or for that; they just put their non-standard visions in a music form with whatever tools they had available at that time. And it did come out all right, an oddity that definitely had its place on the volatile early-90’s music horizon; not in the upper echelons, but in those dark remote nooks where one looks when he/she feels the need for something away from the mainstream, something treading the left-hand-path devotedly with all the potential for posthumous obscure stardom.

Two other formations appeared after the band’s split up: the progressive metallers Enter the Hunt, and the death metal purveyors Comecon. The latter are already a foregone conclusion after shooting three workmanlike full-lengths in quick succession in the mid-90’s, while the former, established much later in the mid-00’s, are still kicking although there’s only one LP released so far, the rest being a string of singles/demos/EP’s. Moments of less schematic song-writing can be detected, but the overall delivery is much less outlandish; the guys must have realized by now that in order to leave the apprenticeship level and step on the master’s pedestal and out of the underground, conforming with the norms should be featured more prominently on their daily schedule.

A bizarre mutation in the evilution - 85%

naverhtrad, August 27th, 2012

To say that The Krixhjälters / Omnitron / Comecon / Enter the Hunt family are an eclectic bunch would be a grotesquely litotic exercise. Reading interviews from Rasmus Ekman, it seems that the creative energies of the band were being splayed all over the damn place, and they couldn’t really agree on what sound to go for. I have noticed that when this sort of thing happens, the two most likely scenarios are a.) the band ends up following a single charismatic and / or control-freakish leader and subverting all of their creative energies to his (or, occasionally her) control; or b.) the band breaks up after a few jumbled, messy flops. The situation for The Krixhjälters / Omnitron was closer to b.), given that they eventually split into the death-grind Comecon (Pelle Ström and Rasmus Ekman) and the more avant-garde heavy metal Enter the Hunt (Stefan Kälfors and Pontus Lindqvist) a good fifteen years later, but I defy anyone to tell me that Evilution or Masterpeace were flops. The last, Masterpeace, is not only a highly unique piece of thrash metal with a level of creativity rivalling if not exceeding Voivod’s Killing Technology, but also manages to rock the fuck out most of the time. The creativity tends to be completely off-the-wall, though: it may take a few listens before one can appreciate the sheer random bizarreness of a lot of what Omnitron are up to. Even then, I’d say it’s a coin-toss whether a thrasher will hail it as a unique diamond-in-the-rough or deride it as a complete train-wreck.

I’m not even just talking about the electronic-style sampling and the sound effects sprinkled liberally throughout the album, though that is certainly part of it. The opening track, ‘The Power Line’, very deftly demonstrates a fondness for disjointed variations in time-signature, a tendency to layer acoustic effects on top of the distortion, or play entire segments in an anti-folk clean-toned style segueing back into the basic thrash riff that snakes in and out of the piece. This is the sort of thing which shouldn’t work. I will gleefully and gladly bash bands for inconsistency, pretentiousness and art-bullshit wankery, and it is easy to see how Omnitron are sidling up to this line. For many thrash purists, they will probably have already crossed that line five seconds in.

But somehow Omnitron are pulling off this cacophony and managing to sound genuine, and it is bewildering to me how they are doing it. They’re pulling in all sorts of random shit on this album: Hammond organs, a saxophone, what sounds like a ukulele, as well as all sorts of vocal effects. A great mystery is how they manage to get all of them to fit. Other songs are just straight-out deliberate in their oddball execution: ‘Rock Drill Iron Ration’ sounds like a rather long Lawnmower Deth composition (also in its lyrical content, actually) if you got Coldplay to do a few of the vocals; and ‘Five in Four’ rides almost completely on its irregular time signature.

At the same time, though, this is very clear and very identifiable thrash. ‘Triumph of What’, ‘Torque Limit’, ‘How the Steel Was Tempered’ and ‘The Tension’ (in a proggier kind of way) are all very catchy in spite of their overarching weirdness. ‘Eroticon’ has a sleazy, loungy, almost grungy feel to it (right down to the female vocals sultrily chanting ‘eroticon’ over and over again in the chorus) but the song just carries along. There is only one part of the album that I simply flat-out hated, and that is the rap section on ‘Lucifertility’ (you know, That Song With the Saxophone). Nothing is more pathetic than a bunch of lily-white Scandinavian guys stopping their own song dead and pretending they can rap (whilst simultaneously throwing in a vocal sample of a little girl) – it actually sounds like a failed early-morning crank radio show, and every time I listen to it I feel like getting in the car, seeking out the nearest such disc jockey and beating the shit out of him with a rusty crowbar. Even my patience has limits.

Thankfully, that section is only a little more than ten seconds long, and apart from that, the rest of the album kicks serious arse. The vocals are not your typical thrash fare, most of them being a comfortable rock baritone, with a few sections where something gruffer gets tried (and some gang-shouts thrown in for good measure – ‘Take! To! The! Skies!’). Production and mixing are both, as is to be expected on an album like this where extra effects are ubiquitous, very high-calibre, so the entire thing sounds well-balanced.

The ‘Ace of Spades’ cover which serves as the Masterpeace’s bonus track I have to describe as near-parody. The tempo has been noticeably quickened, and Pontus’ belted vocals are just frantic enough in playing catch-up with the instrumentation as to sound deliberate. And when he comes around to the ‘AYce of SPAYDEs, the AYce of SPAY-ades!’, the suspicions are pretty much verified in the way he turns around Lemmy Kilmister’s signature modulation. That I appreciate, actually.

Quite honestly, I have listened through this album straight through seven times already, and I still have only a vague clue about how to score it. The only part of it that I actively disliked was the rapcore section in ‘Lucifertility’, but a lot of the bizarreness took more than a few spins to get used to. It did notably grow on me, though, so I’m gonna be generous here and give it a higher-than-average score.

17 / 20