Syzygial Miscreancy

I love zany technical thrash bands, even moreso when they teach me weird words like one of my English teachers that kept trying to shoehorn metal into everything. You might assume, reasonably enough, I get along great with Hellwitch, yet their most celebrated album goes together like germ-x in my hangnails. Song structures feel aimless and crude, its progressive tendencies are nebulous (pardon the pun), and before you bring up the tired counter-argument "you just don't understand it", stop and consider the idea that higher intelligence is required to appreciate art, is how we end up with Jackson Pollock. One of his paintings fetched $200,000,000 USD in a private sale, and I bet I could perfectly replicate it with a blacklight and my carpet.

Essentially a twenty-five minute rehearsal of rinsed off and stitched together demo tracks, Syzygial Miscreancy is a gelatinous blob of conflicting ideas where sequencing can neither enter nor escape. The spasming tempo shifts and the the herky-jerk, stop-start riffs of 'Noferatu' feel amateurish, undisciplined, and at times, unfinished. 'Viral Exogence' begins with some vague semblance of a holding pattern, with an intriguingly chaotic riff that soon collapses into a fuzzy morass of mistimed blastbeats and screechy vocals that sounds like Mille Petrozza's lung collapsed. If it's not the peculiarly heavy bottom-heavy mixing, it's Patrick Ranieri causing me the most misery. Rather than piggyback off Snake's pulpy and enthralling performance in Voivod's War and Pain, Ranieri's approach is more derivative of traditional thrash. Thus, his unrestrained, rapid-fire delivery and inflection has plenty of zeal, but feels unqualified to parallel to Hellwitch's unique approach to technical thrash riffs.

Riffs, I should confess, are rather enjoyable. 'Purveyors of Fear' and 'Sentient Transmography' are the two standouts for me, each boasting a kitchen sink of hard-hitting, high-tech riffs that span a vista of blistering speed and slow, doomy crunch. The latter also boasts one of the album's better solos, despite being headlocked rather tightly beneath Kerry King's sweaty armpit. That being the case, when Syzygial Miscreancy hits, I'll admit that it hits hard. And on the topic of confessions, Tommy Mouser's bass is nothing short of genius, even comparable to Atheist's Unquestionable Presence at times.

In spite of this, I won't be rushing to erect any altars or hurrying to embed this album into any pantheons. Despite its diction and cult status, Hellwitch are hardly what I'd call innovators. Many technical thrash albums beat Syzygial Miscreancy to the punch, and they were more substantial, more thought-provoking, and more consistent in the process. Though I'll admit Hellwitch has them all beat if they broke out the Scrabble board.