Omnipotence

Both sound and structure on Omnipotence remain unique from the gridlocked masses of grind and death metal. The initially-shocking vocal delivery emits fire-breathing, earthy doominess, and gasoline-gargling at different times. The band lurches and slams its way through some of great death grind riffs and bridges while keeping musical ambience and generally complex song structures. Note there’s no keyboard, and the ambience comes from creative musicians and good production. The songs are generally huge and mid-paced like bellowing clouds, but they are heavily seeded clouds, infused with power. The majority of the vocals traverse back and forth between (astonishingly-low) bear-grunts and wrathful-ranting that you can find in much death metal.

A wide panorama of prog metal, grind, and doom metal is seen in most songs. Occasionally one musician lights up some unique passage without too much interference by the other musicians. Song structures are generally complex; sometimes overly complex. That said, frequently a deep groove riff fuses small parts together brilliantly. Blistering power-violence riffing turns into sluggish grind, slowly gaining momentum towards a wailing guitar solo. There is a smidgen of singing and spoken word, but not enough to make me stop any song, despite my extreme reservations against that sort of thing. The lyrics follow psychological and philosophical themes, including inquiry about society and ourselves. I generally find the music so interesting I can’t concentrate on what the vocalist is saying.

Albums like this make me extremely glad I'm not too smart about describing music. Now why on earth I picked an incredibly complex and fun album like Omnipotence as my first reviewed album, go figure.