Solos are what you do for kicks after all the hard work is done. Especially in Death Metal, songwriting, structure and dynamics are key, and other things are keyring. My weight justifies the making of a comparison of solos, layerings and atmosphere, to icing on the cake. I'm in a band in which I mostly do atmospheric accompaniments to preexisting guitar lines and lyrics. I am as keyring as can be there, the most expendable member of the band, and it's soul-crushing to think of how many people could totally do my job for me, and better. And if the band sucked, I wouldn't have been able to help, I could be playing the most awesome keyboard lines in existence and they wouldn't transcend beyond awesome keyboard lines embedded in a shitty song. What I'm saying is that without a good framework, you're not going anywhere.
What Embryonic Devourment are saying is that everyone already knows what a good framework sounds like anyway, so why not challenge mentalities a bit. With a sound methodically dry and soulless they trod at a pace fast enough to sound exactly like a relaxed one, convolving their path from A to B and exploring every possibility that they provide themselves with thanks to an especially abstract riffing style. They manage to merge catchy melodic phrases with the elements one would expect to come out of a production job of this kind: chugs, pinch harmonics, the like. Sometimes they bring a few of those textbook interval sequences that you'll hear every average TDM band employ too. Now here's the interesting part. They put their own spin on these elements, and they calculate riff interlocks and phrasal variations in such a way as to proportion a truly grueling, confusing, disorienting, and most of all, dynamic experience. Couple that with the generally cyclical and/or stream-of-consciousness-like song progressions and before you know it, they've succeeded in making standard Progressive Metal and standard Brutal Death Metal fuck each others' brains out in a radioactive slum to the point of highly mutated conception, and you didn't even notice anything because you were too busy calculating the exact percentage to which the band has doomed its entire career by having chosen a vilification-magnet of a snare drum.
Not that I blame you, I don't think Embryonic Devourment blame you either, in fact I think they're celebrating a plan FOREF - phase 1 pulled off flawlessly.
You see, there's a respectable amount of deception going on in this release, intentional or not. For the sake of justifying the ejaculatory stream of praise to the axe and thunderwielders in question, I'll assume that all aspects of the album are intentional. The first thing to take into account is the employment of a Tony Koehl artwork, stylized in a distinct Tony Koehl fashion, all juiced up in the usual Tony Koehl fare. The cover is trademark sci-fsychedelameriguro with the master of sci-fsychedelameriguro inking up the paper, is what I'm saying. Meanwhile, the music itself is quite evidently separated from spacey / psychedelic / goreporn aesthetic. Most evidently at the latter half, what with the “neo” “-” “classical” melodies and the tribal motif at the end. The production has also taken you for a ride, you succumbed to your expectations, haven't you? You heard tech pap in good material, you haven't noticed the craft, right? These guys have done their job well, now as a listener your duty is to be patient.
This is the go-to album for when one has the feeling of having gotten a hang of life because of the understanding it gives regarding one's own imperfections. The mind is not strong enough until one is entirely aware of the direction these tracks take at all times.
