Blotted Science - The Animation of Entomology review

Year : 2011
Genre : Instrumental Experimental Technical Death Metal
Label : EclecticElectric
Origin : United States
Rating : 10 / 10

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If you think you have heard wickedly complex music before, supergroup Blotted Science is about to utterly shatter your definition of it. Alex Webster on bass, (Cannibal Corpse, ex-Hate Eternal) Hannes Grossmann on drums (Obscura, ex-Necrophagist) and Ron Jarzombek (Gordian Knot) on guitars deliver an EP that is a true privilege to listen to, because it is 25 minutes of madness-level experimental beauty, orchestrated to instruments of thick grit that are ready and able - and eager, too - to rumble, to caress, to smash, to assuage, to : exquisitely entertain.

For the first time ever, this here diligently nihilistic - !¿?! - music review site Noiseshaft has no other chance than to give maximum points (at minimum) and bow down with religious awe to the mighty, triumphant beauty of the organized fractal chaos this supergroup has summoned via what must have been an aeon or two of heavy duty work. Blotted Science is 25 minutes of melodic technical breaks, interrupted / followed / contained by yet another dosage of melodic technical breaks. What possibly could be the result of 25 minutes of melodic technical breaks, one could ask. Well, the result is that you will be thrown to the highly questionable but not at all stale care of Mr. Phractal K. Oss, and, once you decide that you listen to him instead of chickening out like a little bitch, you will realize that the epitome of the millisecond to get safely bored by, is not a member of this robust sonic domain. Plug yourself in ASAP, because this right here is the extreme music with full blown capacity to remap your nervous system. Read on to find out how this record will claim your attention as its own via pure brilliance and ruthless efficiency.


The name of the game herein is complexity, complexity and complexity. There is nothing else on this EP. It is "just" pure complexity, administered/revealed by a smartly researched layered sonic strategy that bombards your receptors on three main frequencies. First, you have the rumble, courtesy of crazy-ass specter-rhythm guitars and the squad leada' bass, each disciplined and commanded by stellar drum performance. In the higher frequencies, the EP has a comfy operational field established to liquified solo (synth / guitar) work that gets complimented as - uuuuhm - stuff happens. The only rule the EP remains faithful to, is to eradicate all of those at the first place, declaring brand new ones along its triumphant way of rampant progression.

As for the third channel the release happens along, it has more to do with its primer tactics to keep your awareness engaged. (Having no position given to refuse.) Blotted Science, in character, shows similarities with experimental music that is conceived to glorify each and every notes of western music, and it seems pretty safe to say that Arnold Schönberg, one of the most prominent supergurus of atonal music, also is a very happy man if and when he listens to this release, and I suspect he secretly does, right at this moment. Yet, Blotted Science surpasses the "rules" of atonality in a sense that it is on a constant, relentless mission to seek out and kiss the PATTERN that is worth entertaining to a point from which on it is a declaration to let it drop dead.

Blotted Science does not at all lose any of its type of constant intensity in case it chooses to relentlessly abuse every note in rapid succession, and the reason for this is the band's ubiquitous ability to form decipherable musical patterns for FUN-, and for a SECOND, and they do all this so they can let it collapse and look for another, right after inspection. This aspect of building superb patterns for the consorting fun of blasting it away with another, is primer element on this release, and also the aspect that makes this record a stellar delivery. The music that happens herein is beyond words, and that exactly where music worth listening to, starts.

One could attempt and approach the gigantic sonic matter herein from a dozen other verbal directions, but what the point of that would be? This release is not 25 minutes of extreme music. Instead, courtesy of its immense complexity, this is 25 minutes of infinity. If you did not yet grind the drift here, then let me tell you this : Blotted Science is pure brilliance, and I don't see how music could want to get more serious and exigent than this. 10 / 10. At minimum.

Rating : 10 / 10

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Revocation - Chaos of Forms review

Year : 2011
Genre : Technical Death Thrash Metal
Label : Relapse
Origin : United States
Rating : 9.2 / 10

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Revocation is one super-eminent representative of a new breed of extreme music that sounds both relentlessly rabid AND eloquent at that. Everyone with imagination and ears accessible have the capacity to make up fine inner music that is out - oops - to destruct all things on sight, but the realization of such an avid flow of aural stimulus takes vast amount of diligent work. With its third full length silence massacre, Revocation unleashes monumental heft, and makes sure it does not lose steam during the 46 minutes it has the fuel for.

Chaos of Forms, in its mere nature, sounds to be a similar output than the latest of that of fellow thrasher group Deceased, in a sense that both installments consciously chose to utterly reject shortcuts and compositional methods a composer could live and sleep well without being voodooed by the masses. Instead, each and every second you will be graced with top of the heat sonic content that rains into you without any need on its part to rely on such standard presentational solutions as repetition or the introduction of "showsaver-hooks", so to speak. There is truly no need for them, if and when an entire album is one huge hook to pull you over its own body without inquiring about the state of your taste and safety. Read on to find out how this album kicks your ass a million ways in any given moment it rides on the volume by.


Revocation's Chaos of Forms is a bottomless treasure chest of superbly sculpted riffs and rhythms that know no no other King to bow down to than the mere flamboyancy they command to exist to triumph by. The intricacy of the content herein is so beautifully rabid and convoluted that the building blocks of one single track of the release could easily serve as a massive sequence in the body of a much less ambitious-, and STILL totally solid spin. The record simply can not be caught repeating itself, as delicious extremities are handing the door knob over to the other, always maintaining a continuous flow of sonic developments in which the common demeanor is the stone-sober faithfulness to seriously researched and manically presented intensity.

The album, needless to say, knows and brilliantly abuses every single mood of the extreme you have ever noticed to crave your attention, and it is the arrangements themselves that separate this record from the flock : you surely must have heard double bass before, but it is one thing to submit to its brutal charm having no gap to form an other choice on, and it is an entirely different matter to witness the double bass revealing its stupendous True Character, a much lifting result of avoiding the constant use of it. Revocation, quite wisely, keeps the double bass among the tools that guarantee the flawless operation of the 111% Thrashing Mode, and once it engages, it truly emerges as a row of mountain-sized bulldozers without drivers, rumbling into your awareness.

An important clarification needs to be made, and here it is : Chaos of Forms, in nature, is an extremely aggressive album, yet this is a rigorously and skillfully controlled, eloquent form of aggression that knows the limits and entertainment value of its respective charms well enough to not subject its absorber to any one those charms for too long. As such, there is a whole lot to be absorbed here, because every second of the release comes with the intent to present you stuff that is beyond doubt worth to be absorbed.

This is the shit.

The record has segments of monumental mid-tempos, exceptionally elegant guitar solos and some absolutely hilarious sequences that border on the vibe of easily accessible hard rock riding on an adrenalin rocket and waving two chainsaws, but bear in mind that these sequences are reigning way beyond the gesture of filling out the showtime with some cozily digestible stuff. Instead, whatever the band comes into contact with, it turns it into a golem of gold and commands it to thrash its surroundings ASAP.

With an immense aural contribution that pretty much cultivates a secret love for experimental extreme while remaining absolutely true to its primordial intent to flatten stuff out first, Revocation - Chaos of Forms is the extreme music you KNEW should have existed. Only know : it does.

Rating : 9.2 / 10

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Fleshgod Apocalypse - Agony review

Year : 2011
Genre : Symphonic Technical Death Metal
Label : Nuclear Blast Records
Origin : Italy
Rating : 9.3 / 10

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If you want to come up with one of the most masochistic schemes a random mind could conceive to kill time with, then counting the number of bass drum beats this here release from Italy's premiere symphonic death metal act features, is a choice you can surely and safely rely on. Agony packs pretty much maximum level intensity by playing out even the one last, secretive, remaining remembrance of holy shit out of death metal, making this outing nothing less than a - in respectful freestyle after mixed martial arts legend Ken Shamrock - hymn to living death.

This album, while represents, maybe, even defines a kind of over the top extremity, brings with itself subtle tools of profound elegance to project light on the monumental sonic surface it emerges to crush you to a sticker as. Once you are ready to open your mind to the fact that Fleshgod Apocalypse writes the story into a Space Odyssey monolith using titanium jackhammers, - with a casual symphony as accompaniment - then you are good to sit on board, and are likely to experience something you and your receptive mind had no part of before. Be wary though, because these jackhammers are ever-present and persistent enough to put a superbly short end to the lazy ear. To these ears, only a classic saying remains, one which you can find at the closure of this review. Read more to find out - among other things - what that is.



Agony is a layered affair, as it consists of two simultaneously occurring flow of autonomous and co-existent events. You have a functional, full-blown and tastily orchestrated symphony, caught up in the relentless machine gun fire administered with almost no end by the band's tremendous death metal minigun arsenal. The question here isn't if this rampant spin features parts of double bass - the question is, if it features parts that have no double bass. Sure, it does. The LP's raw power charisma is constructed solidly on a sober sense of balance regarding jackhammer-engagement periods, as the mere rumble the traditional death metal components - drums, guitars, bass - are producing herein, no doubt reign as the most pronounced presence of the affair. This rampantly mad and madly rampant death roar is teased constantly by the underlying background symphony, that which never loses its capacity to enrich, and, in a sense, to assuage the relentless mayhem of the persistent death rumble addressed above.

To topple an already quite functional concept, Agony exhibits the keen and quite fruitful readiness to give the definitive finger to its own nature on occasions, with nothing else in mind than to submit to the much more tenderly silhouetted aspects of music. The record features smartly positioned safe zones, so to speak, musical spaces that will entertain the ears with extremely straightforward classical intermezzos. Having zero concept nor awareness of the act of deceit, they come with a white flag, operated by the unalloyed intent of throwing a grasp of recreational breath into the mix here and there. Fortunately, these intermezzos have the tendency to surprise you even while the record is having one of its notorious onslaughts. Agony exhibits superb craftsmanship and features advanced compositional techniques, venturing forward on occasions to such surprising and functional territories as opera, and, rather efficient opera at that. How it is efficient? It is such, because the tracks feature only little glimpses of it, but those glimpses are reflected in eyes you will remember, eyes you want to soak yours into again.

Though it is easy to regard the aforementioned rumble created by the drums and guitars as a sonic mass, on careful observation, the mere immensity of this mass starts to account its own shapes and forms, and this act of consciously "going-after-it" is what is required on YOUR part in order to get the full experience the outing is capable to offer as its ultimate value. It is a waste of good suffering to resonate the evident and state that Agony is not an easily accessible record, primarily because being easily accessible is exactly the last one of its concerns. Fleshgod Apocalypse delivers the memorable full musculature hybrid of symphony and extreme metal, and the magic simply is formed by the sheer sonic volume these combined elements are rabidly occupying. Symphony is elegantly liquidated in its nature, and it keeps its capacity to live and shine even if a wartank is in constant siege beside it. Death metal is wartank, symphony is oil in its engine. A combination that might very well emerge as one of the most significant deliveries of the year. Oh, and, for the lazy ears, and, for the lazy ears only : this is better than it sounds to - you. Listen again, maybe?

Rating : 9.3 / 10

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Obscura - Omnivium review

Year : 2011
Genre : Technical Death Metal
Label : Relapse Records
Origin : Germany
Rating : 9.2 / 10

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German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling contributed an immense body of work to bath a curious mind in, while it comes as a rather interesting development if and when his lamentations regarding nature and spirit serve as a primal inspirational source to frame a musical declaration around.

It is nothing less than the rigorous, yet playful establishment of fractal level musical complexity what German death (?) metal formation Obscura has gotten itself into during the preceding years of the release of Omnivium, an output that has all the chance in the cosmic void and beyond to raise the bar for consecutive deliveries that dare to eye towards, or venture into musical fields characterized by radical intricacy happening for the mere sake of celebrating the ensuing audio pattern's capacity to exist and to entertain. This is nothing less than the celebration of life, the celebration of information.



A function, perhaps, one of the most important one of life, paradoxically is to find the ultimate function and related benefits of its mere existence, that which necessarily enriches its surroundings simply by observing it and making inner-directed, and even outward-directed notions of it. Regardless of the intention in the action, the fabric in which the action or thought takes place in, is suddenly enriched by the act or thought, and there is no real knowing on the human actor's part if his action or even thought made any kind of permanent and/or truly relevant impact in the mere space-time he operates in. One thing seems to be sure, though : as he acted or created a thought, information was born, and this constant birth, infinite birth and infinite rapid evolution of information seems to be an inescapable attribute of - well - inescapable information, that which shapes us and that which we constantly shape by our thoughts, actions and emotions.

To cite the classic :

shit lives forever,
shit lives forever
you can't kill it,
you can't kill it

- Faith No More

Before you would assume that this will be a philosophical stare into a random sonic abyss, let's conclude this introductory section to Obscura's Omnivium by abusing the quite safely abusable, noting that life indeed seems to be persistently mysterious and a phenomena worth investigating, - not that you have much of a choice right now, anyway - especially so when this investigation takes place through audible transmissions intentionally arranged into carefully engineered musical complexity that indeed flirts with any casual fractal chaoses that comes along its infinite ways.

Omnivium is a constant assault on your mere awareness of processing audible data, as the traditional elements of the genre bring with itself a muscular musical build formed out of riffs that have seen and got obsessed by and with a musical language that exhibits no particular desire to offer you a hook or two to safely grasp unto. Omnivium slides you around on its convolutely fragmented wall of sound fabric as it seems fit, and you find yourself to be the enjoyer of the experience, simply by attempting to decipher the massive amount of audible stimuli waging their valiant war on your receptors. Odd time signatures and free spirited melodic lines complimenting each other in the background are among the most frequent occurrences you will behold herein, and even the more easily approachable grooves have the tendency to playfully throw themselves and dissolve into the fractal chaos for a ride or two, thus their returning into a triumphant reassemblement will serve both as guide and a compass during the vortexes of sound storms you will be subjected to during the spin of the release.

Obscura speaks a carefully selected variety of musical moods on Omnivium, the pivotal elements being a fluent and free spirited neo-classical approach, primarily utilized to give you short breaks from the aforementioned fractal craze, that which serves as ever-present threat-constant during the experience, as you won't ever be sure when it is about to take you again for a stroll in itself. The moments it does take you by, are the moments that do draw the archetypical face of Omnivium.

A cunningly presented haunting feel also is incorporated into the mood palette, which wisely stays away from seeking cheap instant terror on you, and flirts instead with the mere mysterious, placing you into a tale full of secrets and unknown nearby potentialities, luckily showing zero interest in scares and negativistic tendencies. The end portion of the track "A Transcendental Serenade" is a great example for this feeling : it seems to be evident that the ensuing melody - that actually has a hook, it IS one big hook, in fact - tells about something that has a crushing relevance, but this relevance also seems to be one that reigns way beyond the intention of good old fashioned destruction for the mere sake of good old fashioned destruction. Of life. Of you. As long as you keep an open mind, the experience, the entity the music is about, will do no harm in you.

Omnivium's lyrics are preoccupied with intimate inner lamentations regarding consciousness and its surroundings, oftentimes arriving at interesting notions that seem to seek to exhibit poetic qualities. Obscura's delivery is one that manages to keep you fully interested and engaged during the 59 minutes ride it takes you on, and also one that flirts with musical vistas that are essential to investigate for the supreme purpose of entertainment, which seems to be a rather legit function of life on its own.

Rating : 9.2 / 10

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