Pestilence - Consuming Impulse
Review: Advancing further into the death metal style grants this band more room to experiment with structure and in doing so, to affirm the strength within its songwriting and to use the assumption of that communication to further permeate a matrix of memes into listener consciousness which reassembled form the interlocking details that create symbolic representation of reality. Less strident and of consistent dynamic of tempo than its predecessor, this album through better production and more control of rhythm guitars portrays a heavier ambience as well.
Growth of technical riffing styles abounds, as in perpetuity a simpler pattern finds itself split and then recombined into a hierarchy of combat representing a theme, matched to wary drumming which lunges into direct blasts before returning to any of several states of jazz-style suspension based on double-hit principles. The guttural screams of van Drunen mark time and encourage the bounding rhythm to expand toward impact as labyrinthine songs culminate toward self-deconstruction.
1. Dehydrated
2. Process of suffocation 
3. Suspended animation
4. The trauma
5. Chronic infection
6. Out of the body
7. Echoes of death
8. Deify thy master
9. Proliferous souls
10. Reduce to ashes
Flickering fingers of fast harmonic technique foreshadow the obsession with pitch harmonics that would later inundate American bands, and within a series of tempo breaks Pestilence excel within the alternating rolling and explosive rhythms of death metal working itself toward unrighteous fury. Lyrics emphasize moribund topics and nihilistic acceptance of death as a cessation of consciousness, forcing the rawness of the experience forward in descriptive text with reasonable awareness of science.
While clearly still of the previous generation to death metal in that its speed metal intentions appear in riff rhythm and structures Pestilence transform their heavy metal origins here with the beginnings of a clearer obsession with theory, although the chaotic knowledge they seem to have absorbed favors metal styles more than imitation of a specific genre. Variation in tempo and texture colors theme with mood. In innovation perhaps early by some years, this band continued the art of death metal through articulate riffing programmed into effective sequences joining emotion to knowledge in will against death for the lawless and gentle gifts of creativity.