Walk Through the Hyper Space

An axiome: any act with a name identical or near-identical to the one of the Duke of Hell is bound to produce a gem. Write this down, please, and for the next, both Metal and Maths, textbook editions this one has to be featured prominently, including in the end-of-year exams. I’m not going to indulge in a list of great outfits carrying the same, or very similar, moniker cause now I want you to try and imagine if Pestilence’s “Spheres” was a fuller-fledged death metal album, with all the psychedelia, surrealism and fusion-esque futurism retained but mixed and executed in a more aggressive, more overt deathly fashion. Add a tad muddier production to the produced image, plus a ravenous semi-shouty deathly throat behind the mike, and you may come close to what these Slovakian artists have created.

Pretty great visionary music for the time of release, which can’t possibly be perennially bound to the good old death, and in a manner similar to the mentioned Pestilence album it deviates into more or less expected paths, consistently producing delights along the way. Starting with the digressions, unnaturally, the not very slight: the goofy heavy/power closer “Sanky”, totally off-context, surely a leftover from some previous recording session, with cleaner more expressive vocals as well; and the ethereally relevant: the two fusion instrumental pieces “Her Soul” and “Veil”, calm soothing lead-driven respites which border on the meditative but are by all means pleasant occurrences.

The rest is top-notch technical death that creeps around the listener in a seductive, lurking manner, seldom perturbing the environment with a more urgent dash (the short explosive “The Great”), sneaking surreptitiously with mazey vortex-like riffs which on the stellar “Garden of Time” will also remind of Coroner. This great garden inevitably produces flowers, here titled “Flowers for Algernon”, a supreme all-instrumental tractate submerged in atmospheric slow-building drama with crawling intricate riffage winding and unwinding in a psychedelic, also operatic fashion. Bigger seeping dynamics rises out of “Triumph of Death”, the more urgent rhythm-section stirring at least a semi-headbanging situation, but this is again a labyrinthine soundscape which also incorporates the bass more fully, the four-stringer vigilantly burping behind the curtains, providing another fitting background for the restless hectic rifforamas on the surreal, somewhat title-track “Hyperspace”. The steel razor-sharp guitars of “Retaliation of Taollan” nearly change the setting into a colder more dystopian one, but this premature mechanization process is left for Meshuggah and Gorguts before long, the guys finding the way back to their staple warmer shreds and more melodic segments, the shadow of the mentioned Swiss masters rising again on the solid “Cold Equations”, a fever-ish more thrash-oriented march with dark macabre overtones, dexterous nervy bass, and the only downpoint, the sudden change of vocal styles, the man presenting a not very pleasant hardcore-esque shout this time around, perturbing the instilled morose atmosphere.

But nothing can be a major hiccup on this excellent recording, which does sound like a compilation at times with the various nuances rolling throughout, those bouncing off each other in a patient, non-rushed fashion, the dominant mid-paced stride tolerating both more laid-back and more aggressive insertions. It’s a fairly strong beginning for the band who did have original ideas to share with the rest of the world, falling into this essential group of acts (Pestilence again, Cynic, Atheist, Violent Dirge, etc.) who started looking askance at the music industry, not feeling happy treading on the same place, also finding it hard to tolerate the reckless simplicity of the numetal vogues.

Mentioning the latter, the band here did grab them for the collar of their near-fully faded coat for their full-length “Falling Down” 16 years later, a not particularly shameful downfall with a firmly groovy, also semi-technical approach, which could have given the Meshuggah gang a run for their money if having departed from the underground… but no; the Duke of Hell gave no permission for this batch to hit the spotlight. But he did give the lads a chance to branch out into other initiatives, like the melo-deathsters Sandbridge and the hard’n heavy heroes Pyrimor. Nothing truly devilish, the rockets grounded to zero at this stage… not seeming too eager to launch another journey into hyperspace.