Hypocrisy - Osculum Obscenum
Review: Stripping to an endurance trek minimum the searing riffing of the first album, "Osculum Obscenum" adds melodic structural variations to the standard heavy metal/death metal hybrid that Hypocrisy present within an inspired and revealing aesthetic of phrasing within nearly static harmonic motion. Making sharper metal and playing it faster with more content functions perfectly for the conceptual chaos this delivers, with songs commenting on random occult topics and the disturbing of the moment, including the dubious "Exclamation of a Necrofag."
Songs roll forth underneath their own precepts established in staggered cutting strum of amply spaced intervals in power chords, moving texture from the rigid to the fluid and from the fluid to the self-harmonizing but ambiguous reference of melody. As new themes follow the old, so do familiar patterns reappear, making a cyclic journey through speeding changes and sudden impacts before colliding toward resolution. The sense of pop articulation, which is the art at hand considering the similarity of musical framework between this and most popular culture music throughout the centuries, allows the voice of the music to be more significant than its context.
With a feral timbre of splintering sound, the vocals of hoarse diatribe match grinding guitar and a tendency toward transitional structures of pure rhythm, which breaks sound itself into quanta of chronological placement. Undulating in its rapid descents of fifths and sublime in its transition from abrasive chromatism to minor key melodic strcutural support, the sound from this era of Hypocrisy seizes up aspiration, fear and desire into a trembling note of resonant symbolism through the collaboration of detail throughout each piece.