Individual Thought Patterns

This is Death’s 5th album, and it showed how drastic the band’s transition was from pure death metal to more progressive and power influences. This solos in this album are much less chromatic; but the songs still have the brutality of the first 3 albums, similar to human. Although I prefer human to this album, Individual thought patterns still holds up amazingly well today.

Songs like trapped in a corner have great riffs that have an almost perfect balance between sheer brutality and technicality. I think that’s what makes the last half of the death discography very special to me; there’s a perfect equilibrium between two very different styles of metal, something that was very rarely done before or after Death’s legacy, and was virtually seldom replicated the way Chuck did it in his writing. The guy had so many influences that formulated his genius songwriting.

The album starts off with Overactive Imagination, a short but relentless song. Jealousy is another interesting song, featuring more of Chuck’s philosophical lyrics and his addictive riffing. I’m not too keen on the song “out of touch”, because it’s really about Chuck turning his back on the death metal community, which is pretty sad considering he was a pioneer of death metal. The album is wrapped up with the philosopher, a mind-blowing song that really showed us a taste of things to come (symbolic, anyone? How about the sound of perseverance?). Anyway, this record is essential, and it’s my 2nd least favourite death album, so when I say that this record is essential, you know that death is a force to be reckoned with.

The production in this album is about on-par with human, although I feel like they could have mixed the vocals slightly better, everything else sounds pleasing to the ears, and songs like "Jealousy" signify the most that Chuck really wanted to change Death's direction, the more dynamic alterations to the production compared to the first 3 albums almost go hand-in-hand with the refined songwriting, which works well. This is the first Death album to feature Gene Hoglan on drums, and he kills it.

Overall, this album has bad luck, as it is sandwiched between two absolute masterpieces, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored, the songs on here have aged well, and they all have something gripping to offer,