Apoptosis

The new album from Allegaeon just dropped and it's an absolute beast. Following their 2016 album "Proponent for Sentience", "Apoptosis" marks the band's fifth full-length release and sees them moving further into technical and experimental grounds but still staying true to their already well defined sound. For any fan of technical death this should be a real treat. And it doesn't take long to know that once it starts running. With a two minute intro, they showcase everything that this album is about, going through guitar riff savagery, speedy leads, stand-out bass lines, crazy drums a dash of acoustic guitar. You don't have a chance to get bored because they pour all their aces on you from the very beginning and then keep up that standard all the way to the end of the record.

Allegaeon's style should be easier to get into than most bands in this genre. If you've heard them before, you know that they do a great job at combining technical and melodic elements to make their songs really appealing. And in this new release, they have refined their craft even further so that it is more tight and intense while maintaining that same groove and melody shining through. The blistering speed in the pedals is certainly an element that will draw a lot of attention but the guitars don't fall behind, churning riff after riff of utter madness. The pace of the music is incredibly dynamic and oftentimes invites you to bang your head until it pops off. But there is also a lot of intricate wizardry happening beneath the flashy appearance with progressive twists seeping in from time to time and an overall affinity for filling all the empty spaces with well thought details to keep a sense of continuity throughout the song. The guitar leads also pump up the energy with ridiculous speed and shamelessly steal the spotlight with no restraint. And it really gets nasty is when the bass takes the fore-front and when the guttural vocals start slaying through your ears.

"Apoptosis" is also the subject of some killer production work that keeps it sounding sharp, clean and very full. Sometimes it actually builds up to what can be called an "epic wall of sound", courtesy of soaring lead melodies and machine gun style riffing and drums that don't let a fraction of a second slip by without being shattered by the deluge of overdriven grinding. The entire mix simply drips badassity and creates an explosive personality for the album that cannot be contained in any known rules of decency. It is preposterous (in all the good ways).

But the only thing that bothers me is the same thing that was wrong with their previous record. When you just stack lunacy upon lunacy upon more lunacy, it gets a bit oversaturated to the point where you can't really taste it as well. They just pump song after song with this "In Your Face" recipe and it tends to get a bit repetitive, not in creativity cos' that is way over the top, but in the vibe of the record. It says the same thing from beginning to end. However, this issue is slightly addressed with a few moments that break the pattern like a few very surprising and striking insertions of clean vocals. They also unplug the death metal monsters and switch to acoustic in "Colors of the Currents" and the atmospheric intro for "Tsunami and Submergence" is one of the most unexpected things. These are minor details thrown into the colossus of aggression but they make a big difference and actually tune down the redundancy of the record from being a big issue to just a minor glitch. Apoptosis is a must for any fan of technical death metal and also an album that might attract new people to the genre thanks to its strong melodic and groovy side. Horns up for Allegaeon! You got a seriously sick banger on your hands.

Originally written for The Metal Observer.

The continental United States has enjoyed the rise of a fairly prolific tech death scene over the past 15 years, rivaling the exploits of the earlier guard as embodied in Suffocation and northern neighbors Cryptopsy, yet also developing something of a more lyrically nuanced take on the stereotypical imagery that goes with the sub-genre's history. Coming off the rabid obsession of technical precision that was pioneered by a number of European outfits such as the enigmatic Necrophagist, and adopting a comparatively cold, scientifically based imagery and a helping of Gothenburg-influenced melodic sensibilities that were popularized by the northeastern metalcore scene to which American tech death tends to share a degree of familiarity with, a number of bands in the American south and mid-west have risen to a degree of prominent within the past decade. Among the likes of Vale Of Pnath and Inferi, the Colorado-based shred machine that is Allegaeon takes a similarly fancy yet measured road by riding the coattails of Arsis and The Black Dahlia Murder while also injecting a heavy dose of showmanship into the equation that is fairly reminiscent of Beyond Creation and Revocation.

To put it more plainly, all recent rivers in American tech death circles pour into the same ocean, and among the more blatant testaments to this fact is this outfit's latest LP Apoptosis. Aptly named for the phenomenon where cells die and are rapidly replaced during the growth and maturation of a biological organism, the presentation is precision-based, all but too a fault. Amid the rapid foray of technical displays between ever instrumentalist involved, not the least of which being a wild bass display right out of the Steve DiGorgio playbook on the opening instrumental " Parthenogenesis" (not to downplay the near equally brilliant Revocation-influenced lead guitar work on the same 2 minute overture) and a truly mesmerizing nylon string acoustic guitar performance on "Colors Of The Current" courtesy of one-time live bassist of Norwegian black metal trustees Gravdal, there is a reasonably degree of symmetry and melodic accessibility amid the creative destruction of guitar, bass and drum noodling. If there is anything lacking in the final product, it is a strong sense of processed, heavily produced perfection that will no doubt come off as inorganic to most old school death metal fans, but not all that much more than the average Arsis offering.

Despite the extremely elaborate presentation, this album has a generally compact demeanor that makes it a bit more accessible than the average outing by Beyond Creation. The generally constant and straightforward pacing of crushers such as "The Secular Age" and "Extremophiles (A)" are touched by a strong dose of vocal brutality that's strong enough for the average Suffocation fan, but have a consonant enough harmonic scheme to appeal to someone with a pallet more aligned with the likes of Septicflesh and Fleshgod Apocalypse, minus the Beethoven-based symphonic pomp. Some of the longer offerings such as "Stellar Tidal Disruption" flirt a bit with a metalcore presentation in the riffing department and sound like a one-off marriage of Revocation with Killswitch Engage, while the more coasting atmospheric and progressive character of "Tsunami And Submergence" manages to flirt even more closely with said sound by throwing in some crooning clean vocals to complement the guttural ravings and cacophony of wild lead breaks. At times the amount of stylistic synchronicity going on within each of these songs is so dense that it almost gets to the point where one can visualize what the process that this album's title denotes would look like if one had microscopes for eyes.

While the overall package can come off as a bit mechanistic and artificial, in no small part due to the heavy reliance upon modern studio tech to smooth over all the various cogs and wheels that make up this elaborate machine of an album, its overall sense of dedication and reliance upon mostly symmetrical songwriting makes it all work quite nicely. It's not quite something that would win over anyone who is strongly dedicated to death metal traditionalism and is looking for something along the lines of a pre-melodeath and pre-progressive era of death metal where things either thrash or otherwise lay off the wild technical extremes that became popularized at around the turn of the millennium thanks to the 90s efforts of Cryptopsy and, to an extent, latter day Death. Nevertheless, it's about as accessible as one can get on the fancier side of modern technical death metal and will definitely play to the already converted, even if it's the first album by Allegaeon to grace a prospective listener's ear. For every cluster of cells that gets annihilated by this album's growing rage, twice as many will emerge for another round of punishment until the growth process has been completed, or until the next Arsis album drops.