Unused Imaginative Capacity

You’ve got to be a bit careful when calling your debut album something like Unused Imaginative Capacity, just in case anyone uses it as an insult against you. At least that’s not as bad as calling your band Lifeless (like 8 groups on MA), Useless (2 of them), or even Shit, which has surprisingly been chosen twice. At least Intrepid sounds pretty positive and, on the whole, I’m pretty positive on what this Estonian quintet has to offer. All the members were born after the year 2000, which might turn away fans of old school death metal, but rest assured that they know how to handle their instruments and incorporate traditional ingredients into their technical compositions.

I’m not normally in the mood for a lot of blasting and fast riff changes, so everything has to be just right for me to enjoy death metal in its pure form. Here, a bold production helps a great deal, keeping all instruments in order and punching at maximum capacity, more or less what opener ‘Pierced by Hatred’ is designed to do. The assault isn’t limited to raw aggression though, opting for unsettling melodies at mid-pace during ‘Behold the Scourge’ and lengthy lead guitar jamming in the intro to ‘Suicidal Necessity’. The 2 guitarists thus work hard to elaborate on basic riffs, rarely letting the same pattern run too long without changing something. Equally, the drums linger over everything, going for double kick as often as blasting and also peppering fills into more gradual moments. Call it variety, but I recognize a lot of specific old school nods, sometimes pinching the guitar tone of Obituary or a moment of a solo from Entombed - hell, ‘Behold the Scourge’ has a part that sounds like Megadeth’s ‘Devil’s Island’. There’s certainly a lot less modern influence than one might expect from a group of 18 year olds.

To pick out an album from amongst a sea of OSDM, however, remains difficult purely for the fact that so many exist. Intrepid probably won’t stand out any more than another competent new band, since the way they approach the sound is to please fans of early ‘90s death and no one else. In some ways, Unused Imaginative Capacity might actually be a prophetic title, playing a little like an audition of deathly styles: ‘Caustic Reign’ sees the lads take a shot at grindcore, ‘Insidious Plague’ drops a brief beatdown, and closer ‘Methodical Chaos’ proves they can write something more epic too. This will likely attract plenty of local attention and give Intrepid a chance at playing to bigger audiences, though we mustn’t get carried away.

The outstanding feature for me must be the lead guitar, since the effects and tones used are so evocative of Morbid Angel and Death and their ilk (New York doom death mavens Winter too, for some reason), drawing images in intricate detail for the listener to wax nostalgic or escape into other realms. Occasionally, a reliance on noisy squeals or bland riffs kills the uncanny vibe a little, yet doesn’t harm the total experience. I’d say that Intrepid used about three quarters of their imaginative capacity to cook up a solid debut album.