Dimension of Deviant Clusters

Unfortunately, as someone who fellates experimental and avant-garde music down to the depths of my throat, “plain” metal is sort of hard to get into nowadays. If it ain’t proggy or melodic as fuck, I need something extra, something more, more, MORE. Whether it be the one-time banjo in a black metal song or a melodic solo in straight-up death metal, I need those little doses to hit my sweet spot and remind me that I'm also a fucking weeb pop-head who needs songs to have some sort of notable gimmick so that I can connect to it viscerally. Recently, I’ve been getting into the 90s death metal bands and albums that I have lied and said I have listened to—I spent so much of my formative years on Viking shit; my classics knowledge is very lacking (don’t ask me about Slayer). The winner so far? Nocturnus. Just that mix of proggy early death metal, where thrash was still a big influence, and spacey keyboards lit a fire in me. From there, like a junkie, I moved to Nocturnus AD/After Death, Luciferion's The Apostate, the recent Tiwanaku, and eventually, Universally Estranged, which scratches my itch and then some.

If I recall correctly, a famous rock musician once wrote a paper on how music is mixed/mastered/produced for specific auditory environments—I wanna say Jello Biafra for some reason (Twas just a college freshman anecdote from my outsider music-loving philosophy major buddy, almost a decade ago, so the mind is foggy). To put it in layman’s terms, some music is specifically made to be played in a car, live, et cetera. Dimension of Deviant Clusters is purely headphones music in my opinion. Weaved between solidly produced death metal are the whirs and bleeps of an ambient/electronic atmosphere, sometimes so interwoven with the death metal that it’s hard to notice if you aren’t playing it loud. And while bands like Nocturnus and Tiwanaku use keyboards for simple atmosphere, Universally Estranged creates soundscapes, which adds to the already solid as fuck death metal. What type? No idea. All I know is that those good 'n' tasty extra bits come and go, in and out like the tide, covering the riffs and low-as-fuck, sometimes almost gurgling vocals with spaced out goodness before retreating, but never fully gone. I mean, sure, you could turn up the speakers and get a noise complaint, but why bother when you—should—have a good pair of headphones right next to you? It's a win-win.

This is a first for me as well, finding a band that releases straight-up death metal albums—more stoned ape than caveman—that needs to be listened to the entire way through; you can’t just pick a song. As a whole, is that a good thing? Honestly, I haven’t gotten a proper solo sesh with Dimension of Deviant Clusters as most of my album listening time is done in tandem with half of my work, so it really takes something good to make me not idle through it. Call it a bit hypocritical that I can’t really discern one track from another and pick out my favorite riffs, but the sheer full-album experience is what really made it for me as I sorted and cataloged 30 years of tax documents for my employer. Yes, I can't say I have a favorite song and I can't point to a super standout song, but for this album, I don't count that a bad thing. It just means that if I'm going to listen to it, I'm going all in, the full thirty minutes.

Universally Estranged’s output reminds me of the musical equivalent of The Void (2016)—creativity in a small run-time and heavily influenced from the classics, done in a modern way. It’s also just really damn good, alright?