Pestilence - Mind Reflections
Review: Pestilence were born into a time when death metal was just emerging from its formative material, and they birthed a hybrid style that maintained a focus on the melodic aspects of speed metal while death metal was detouring into detuned rhythm music, and finally, came back with the beginnings of a new style after they -- and other bands, like Carcass, Entombed and Death -- got tired of being called musically illiterate and brought their music back into line with mainstream rock composition, in the process losing the phrasal riffs that motivated narrative composition that brought metal closer to classical or folk. Mind Reflections chronicles this process by picking some of their stronger material to showcase as one entity.
A single new song, "Hatred Within," joins this collection, but it offers little insight into Pestilence past the demos, as it most closely resembles "Delirical Life" from their Dysentery demo, which itself in vocal pacing and song structure resembles Slayer's "Necrophobic." This track, like early Pestilence attempts, attempts to fuse the raw rhythmic power and architectural design of Slayer songs with the melodic aspects and abrupt transitions of European bands like Kreator and Destruction. As a result, it offers an interesting insight into the origins of most progressive death metal, but also shows it to us in a form that has not broken from the form of its influences to create a language of its own, so for most listeners will be less than an event.
1. Out of the Body (4:40)
2. Twisted Truth (4:04)
3. The Process of Suffocation (2:41)
4. Parricide (3:49)
5. Mind Reflections (3:22)
6. Dehydrated (3:09)
7. Land of Tears (4:48)
8. Hatred Within (6:47) 
9. The Secrecies of Horror (4:56)
10. Subordinate to the Domination (4:18)
11. Dehydrated (live) (3:31)
12. Chemotherapy (live) (4:27)
13. Presence of the Dead (live) (5:54)
14. Testimony (live) (4:30)
15. Chronic Infection (live) (3:58)
16. Out of the Body (live) (5:09)
Intelligently, as the style is hard to integrate with others, this CD picks only one song from Spheres, but offers four songs from Consuming Impulse and two live versions of songs on that album, only one of which is represented in studio form (the live songs are incredibly clear soundboard recordings with remarkably studio-like mixing, apparently from the same session as the 1992 bootleg). Three songs from Testimony of the Ancients and two live, and two studio and one live from Malleus Maleficarum round out the collection with a heavy balance toward the more iconic earlier material, arrayed sensibly throughout the compilation so that newer material blends into the old and shows the fan the continuity of what this band attempted regardless of how the end result appeared. As death metal again questions its direction, this summary release gains new value in its perspective on how these bands struggled for legitimacy and where the answers they found in turn took them.