Inversion of the Unseen Horizon

And the doctor never asked me, when he smacked the band’s debut into my hologram some nine years earlier, knowing full well that I was going to enjoy this hyper-active tech-death carnival, one that was decidedly different from the disciplined chaos stirred on the works of some of the musicians’ previous stint, the short-lived but utterly worth checking out late-90’s/early-00’s act Dichotic.

If Dichotic’s delivery was bizarre, miasmic and hard to pin down, the one here is easier to categorize as it follows the rules of the dazzling brutality movement (Cryptopsy, Katalepsy, Suffocation, etc.) pretty obediently, the guitar acrobatics following in a dazz... sorry, dizzyingly quick succession on each of their recordings, the main difference coming from the regularly-applied melodic sweeps which give the guys’ works a bright uplifting aura, one that also recalls another Canadian formation, Neuraxis.

In other words, the band keep it in the Northern family, including on the album reviewed here, a shining display of musical dexterity which throws awe-inspiring highbrow pyrotechnics at the listener in copious amounts, most of those served on a very speedy hyper-active base. Although the opening “Within the Astral Abscess” very deftly sums up the album’s key points with its far-reaching virtuoso layout, an expansive near-progressive journey through the corridors of the tech-death vault, the fans will still encounter surprises later on, like the delightful atmospheric build-ups on “Summoning the Cosmic Devourer”, the more sterile mechanical expletives on “Masticated by an Infinite Shadow”, the more tamed choppier riff-patterns of “Impaled Upon the Carrionspire”, a labyrinthine tractate on contrived patiently-woven music lore. The remainder obediently surrenders to the canons of the dazzling brutality roster once again, brief but effective bolts of overtly aggressive grandeur that would very easily qualify for Cryptopsy’s “None so Vile” even.

Have been spinning the band’s three outings in succession for a number of days… an admirable efficient therapy of pummelling musical crescendos and overlapping rhythmic patterns I have been undergoing, and can't help but admire the guys’ consistency, proficiency and vision, the three works coming as one compelling tryptich, a focused, meticulously-crafted artistic journey of which the album here may as well be viewed the culmination… and not only because the freshly-released “Harbinger” EP already sounds a bit less striking and a tad more linearly-executed. Nope, no malignant deformations of any kind here, the machine runs smoothly, sizzling and dazzling far beyond the visible horizon, a harbinger of brutal intricate musical greatness.