Monstrosity - Millennium
Review: Death metal strikes back in an album that fuses old styles with the coming dimensions of the genre, integrating pieces of every genre in modern metal into the process with a definitive, encompassing, paradigm of this difficult art form.
Monstrosity come from the style of bands relying on emphatic rhythm and coordinated palm-muted percussion riffing to bring definitive emphasis to their music, yet move freely in the language of the death metal genre, invoking pieces of songs implied by standard styles, but interpreted anew in the heavily architectural textural language of their music. Each song carries a simple virus, a vocal-rhythmic phrase which lurks behind the array of pieces thrown toward the listener, each sub-section of song carrying a subinterpretation of the virus. In a mosaic of mirrors rising latticelike over the base conception of the meme a network of substructures pattern detail upon the ideal reflected from within.
In rhythm guitar power chord patterns blast out dominant themes while extra harmonic coloring varies the riff toward or away from major tonal themes; lead guitar splashes a mutating, twisting, living reaction across a geometry of notes arranged in planes of chords. Behind it in a violent framework of percussion, hard snares ride vocal rhythms with creative fills bringing each phrase to a close.
Many traditions of metal culminate in some form during this music. From speed metal comes the harmonic experimentation within traditionalism, melody, and power-muffled riffing that pervades the technical powerhouses of this album, and from death metal comes the architectural structures and discriminate precision of each player. Vocals are powerful death metal guttural roaring intonations, far from monotone and laden with texture; more importantly than any single attribute, however, is the fusion of these in an album that is powerful, musically analytical and creative at the same time, and despite invocation of tradition something refreshingly new, dedicated to the ripping freedom that is the hallmark of spirited death metal.