Psychoagony

These Basque chaps… big jokers; I’ll never forget how much I laughed on their sophomore, this weird “Karkoma" which is such a curious amalgam of groove, crossover, punk and pure classic heavy metal… there are other ingredients enmeshed there as well, but I don’t want to make the list inordinately long. Let’s just say that this is a listenable albeit very eccentric combination which elevates you in a strange involuntary way provided that this stuff is not exactly your favourite cup of tea.

It was a cup… sorry, couple of years later when I bumped into this “Psychoagony” here; an uplifting goofy blend along the lines of the second instalment would have been alright, but what I heard was something way mightier. So during their early stages the guys were exercising some truly spell-binding, visionary technical/progressive thrash/death that was quite comparable to other Spanish outfits like Canker and Trascendental. This act here were very capable of mixing the stylish aggression of the former with the atmospheric escalations of the latter, the final result a really intriguing, unusual listen.

So prepare for wild hectic thrash-laced shredders (“In This Place”) shaking hands with deeply atmospheric doomy nuances (“Sink Me in the City”), this disparate but alluring bond stitched by the six-stringer, the guy a real sorcerer, throwing dazzling pyrotechnics like pancakes in the air, those amazingly fitting all the served soundscapes. Chapters from Atheist lore (the hectic marvel “The Flock”) come pouring later to a pretty positive effect, “Staining My Name” a nice quiet etude with pretty cool emotional cleaner vocals… oops, I forgot to mention that the main performer behind the mike is a scary deathy shouter who really has to pull himself on the eclectic Alchemist-esque curiosity “Centenary of Humiliation”, a creepy quasi-mechanical tractate which requires more than just rending animalistic shouts to sound convincing. The latter are more fitting to the doom/deathster “What’s Be Human”, another outlandish proposition that also sounds deceptively quiet, like the guys have done their part aggrandizing the environment… nah, no such films, comes “Restricted Existence”, and things get turned upside down, this piece a most cherished chapter from the dazzling brutality movement (Suffocation, Cryptopsy, etc.), a short intricate whirlwind of chaos that sweeps the title-track with the accumulated inertia, this number breaking the hyper-active stride with a couple of well-measured atmospheric serenities.

A fuckin’ feast from the first to the last note, a highly unpredictable ride that pulls you in both with the original compositional decisions and the high level of musicianship, the band walking a not very well-traversed path in the early-90’s, having in mind that the similarly-styled vistas of the mentioned Trascendental appeared a few years later. The spacey frivolous randomness of the follow-up isn’t that strongly felt, though; the diversity is intentionally applied, and follows some kind of discipline. The musicians know the exact place of the quiet passages, the exact location of the doomy escapade; everyone works in unison here to produce this compelling psychoagony that fully justifies the “psycho” part of its title… about the “agony” one, I’m not quite sure… in fact, I can see quite a few souls surviving Judgement Day with flying colours with these tunes embalming them.