Z vyšší vůle

While !T.O.O.H.! receive a fair helping of praise in the underground portion of the death metal scene, their debut album Z vyšší vůle seems to be pretty consistently ignored. I'd be willing to chalk this up to bad distribution: of the first three !T.O.O.H.! full-lengths, this is the only one that wasn't released through a label, and I had to personally message the band just to track down a copy that wasn't going to cost me $180. (If the seller who listed that copy is reading this: you are an awful human being.) Now, before I say this, I want to say that this band have my undying devotion as the guys who produced an album as astonishing as Pod vládou biče; but having heard this and spun it a fair few times, I simply don't think it's as essential as any of the other !T.O.O.H.! releases are.

This isn't pretty, or oriental, or masterfully composed like the band's later releases would be. It does, however, manage to still be strange and abstract, and considering it doesn't seem any less unique 14 years since its release, that's no small feat. Considering the way this sounds and the period of time during which it was released, I would imagine that Gorguts's Obscura was a large influence. There are plenty of swirling, streaming riffs, formed out of a myriad of guitar techniques and chords, which occasionally split into multiple melodies in a multidirectional, dissonant mess before reuniting. Later !T.O.O.H.! releases would generally find ways to do this and make it sound rather pretty, but Z vyšší vůle doesn't even bother with that sort of thing. It zips and sputters and whizzes around in circles - still with a sort of circus-like bravado that the band have had all along, but this features more of a death metal bent to it than its successor (though Order and Punishment could be considered to be a better mix of straightforward death metal with the band's individual quirks).

The vocals are still Humanoid's urgent, frothing, Czech-speaking yaps that I've come to love so much since I started following this band, though here there's a bit less focus given to them. This release feels much more like a jam rock band's take on metal: even by !T.O.O.H.!'s standards, this is very prone to running off to play pseudo-improv for minutes at a time with no vocals in sight. (My favorite songs on this release tend to be the first four, which are all faster on average, and short enough that the band are basically forced to compromise and mix any particularly impressive guitar sections with the vocals.) Unfortunately, the sections that feature them aren't quite as amazing as they would be on subsequent releases. The parts with vocals are usually relatively simplistic, with a more noticeable influence from 90s grindcore. They're catchy, sure, but not quite infectious like the band's strokes of genius tend to be. One other particular complaint would be that the drums are rather quiet and smothered by the rest of the instruments. The snare drum, in particular, is nearly inaudible whenever the band are playing a blast beat, which makes the music actually feel weaker during the moments when it should feel the most intense.

The individual riffs here are just as technical and complex as ever, and they're decent, but they're simply too discordant and not hooky enough to be memorable or especially enjoyable. I mean, it helps that !T.O.O.H.! without their now-trademarked sense of melody are still absurdly good at finding strange shit to do to the traditional death metal riff, but in reality I take the future albums by the project over this almost every time I'm in the mood to listen to them. Still, this is good overall, and worth your time... as a curiosity piece, if nothing else.