Review Summary: Polished and well-executed technical death metal, this time with more tech.
There are a countless number of excellent bands in all genres that release consistently excellent albums one after another, but usually something holds these albums back from being truly phenomenal. Sometimes it’s the production; sometimes it’s a hiccup in songwriting ability; other times they might’ve just forgotten what made them good in the first place. But every once in a while comes a band that gets everything right with one album – perfect production, superb songwriting, and a thoroughly impressive statement in whatever genre it may be, and in the world of technical death metal that’s exactly what Odious Mortem achieved with their 2007 release
Cryptic Implosion.
Technical death metal isn’t the most accessible of genres to begin with; blisteringly fast riffs and blast beats topped off with low guttural vocals, but Odious Mortem managed to take these stereotypes to the next level on
Cryptic Implosion. The impeccably fast riffs have defined melody, something their debut lacked, and the drum work as a whole is absolutely jaw dropping. He does fills in all the right places without sounding too overbearing and ultimately follows and compliments the guitar work to a T (e.g. ‘Nux Vomica’s stop-and-start bridge section). Oddly enough the bass has its time to shine as well, which is pretty rare in a death metal if your bassist isn’t Steve DiGiorgio. Track-pick ‘Domain in the Eternal Paradox’ has a morose bass break near the end which leads into a passage of wonderfully eerie and intertwining melodic guitar leads, taking you away from the brutality for a few moments before slowly fading out into nothing.
If there’s anything negative I could say about
Cryptic Implosion, it would be that it’s almost too much of the same. On their own, any track on this album can hold its own against Cryptopsy's and Suffocation's best work, but viewing the album as one piece of music can be quite overwhelming to some. The tracks tend to bleed into each other, and since they’re all
so technical
all the time, with the exception of ‘Domain in the Eternal Paradox’s outro, it can be a challenge to sit through the whole thing in one sitting. Thankfully at only 35 minutes,
Cryptic Implosion never overstays its welcome, and for all the death metal veterans out there, the consistency with each song shouldn’t be an issue. In fact its this consistency and technical proficiency in
Cryptic Implosion that epitomizes everything tech death should be, and it ultimately shows that in the grand scheme of things, Odious Mortem are not to be fucked with.
Recommended Tracks
- Fragmented Oblivion
- The Endless Regression of Mind
- Domain of the Eternal Paradox
