Rebuild: The Unfinished Interpretation of Irrational Behavior

I'm a bit surprised this band didn't receive more attention for this album, given its odd modernist aesthetic and Willowtip-inspired musical stylings, but maybe that's the fate of a band from Singapore. Sounding like a blend of Malignancy and Swarrrm, Cranial Incisored have their own take on the style of impossibly technical whirlwind death metal on their debut album that takes a lot from the formulas created by bother bands but adds a style all their own. This is certainly a very weird, avant-garde release, but behind all the obvious stylistic digressions is a band clearly try to make something complete despite its oddities.

The bulk of this record is made up of spastic, twitchy, Malignancy-style tech death that jerks around constantly in rhythm and melody, with few riffs being repeated more than a couple times before immediately jumping to a new idea. The almost dadaist drum performance is absurdly technical and seemingly random, breaking from blast to jazzy open hi-hat work with literally no transition between the two. Cranial Incisored does not believe in using fills to link two unrelated parts of music together: instead, they dive from one passage headlong into the next with little regard for the listener's comfort. Hell, this uncomfortable, deranged, Mindly Rotten-esque approach to song construction is clearly deliberate. Beyond the grinding chaos, though, there's a lot of brief, strange intermissions: bursts of electronic music and dubstep, sudden jazzy digressions into slap bass and restrained drumming, and odd samplework dot the musical landscape and are an integral part of the release.

Whether you like this music is a measure of whether you're willing to let the chaos wash over you- it's not really music designed to be understood, and in a way you have to forget a lot of the things you know to look for in music when you listen to this and just get battered by it in the way a new listener would. The stylistic digressions are the only thing that provide any breathing room on this record, and after a few tracks you basically pray for a jazzy moment or dubstep passage in order to get some relief from the constantly churning, shifting nature of the death metal. It's definitely very crazed, random music: just listen to the classic Asian shrieks mixed with gurgles for vocals or the undoubtedly crazy guitar theatrics and you'll see that everything here has clearly been very planned out.

This is in no way a record for fans of 'normal' death metal who aren't interested in the avant-garde, deranged side of the genre, but those who appreciate this sort of thing will find a ton to enjoy. Being a huge fan of Malignancy and generally bizarre death metal, I think this is a really solid record. It's not without flaws- the vocals typically leave me cold and the production could use more life- but it's certainly an ambitious record from a band that doesn't sound like anyone else.