Welcome back to Bandcamp Buried Treasure! See? I didn't abandon you! This is for real! So let's keep kicking off 2014 with sick metal! You know the rules of the article by now:
- I hunt down artists who have their music on bandcamp with their album up for Buy It Now/Free Download and give them a write up. I'm not explicitly telling you to download the album for free since I'm a big supporter of buying your music, but I like the option for my readership to be there.
- The goal is to introduce you to smaller bands or obscure side-projects you might not have heard of. Anything to expand your musical horizons by just a little bit each week!
- And of course, for there to be a conversation about similar bands or bands you think I should be covering. I check the comments section!
Like I said last time, I switched the format up a bit with two new sections, titled "The Basic Idea" and "Why I Love It." The former is a short news-style lead that paints a vivid picture of what you're about to hear to get you interested and help you understand a little why I chose the record, while the latter serves simply as a review piece.
So who's in the mood for some technical death metal ala Cognizance?
The Basic Idea
Cognizance isn't into the frilly flourishes of elongated progressive death metal, nor do they linger on an idea and push it to its' uninteresting breaking point. With Inquisition, Cognizance hits hard and fast with blazing guitars, battering drums and destructive vocals. Inquisition will sate all your technical death metal needs.
Why I Love It
To put it simply, Inquisition is everything I want on a technical death metal record. While some bands feel the need to ride a section out for a little while or keep on a riff just to mutate it ever so slightly on each pass until the next section, Inquisition knows when things are getting stale, when to move on, when to slow down, when to speed up, and when to go right for the jugular. While the release clocks in at about 14-minutes, Inquisition accomplishes more in that time than some bands can in an hour.
If you've been reading my Bandcamp Buried treasure articles, you know I'm a stickler for memorability in my music. Is a song constructed well enough for me to able to sing some part of it back after it's over? Were there interesting patterns that I'll be drumming on my desk for the rest of the day? Stuff like that, so it's safe to assume I've found exactly that with Inquisition. Just for the sake of taking one particular song as an instance for that idea, "Defying a Natural Process." The riff that kicks in at about 0:36 snakes in and out of my ears to the point where I'm almost forced to visualize this wave-like motion. Then right from there it's a crushing slow-motion riff by the guitars while Alex Rudinger (The Faceless) proves he can move at the speed of light on the bass drum pedals. Oh, and then a jazzy guitar solo that I guarantee you'll be looking forward to on every subsequent listen. You get the point- the guys know how to write technical death metal that you're going to remember.
While I'm in love with the overall writing of Inquisition, it's the performance that gets me. Everything on the album is absolutely relentless, exceedingly heavy and confidently played. Like the guys went into the studio with their heads held high so full of themselves that they'd knock this one right out of the park and then proceeded to do exactly that. It also helps that vocalist Henry Pryce has a very unique, throaty, deep growl that you'll not be forgetting anytime soon. Hell, it'll probably even intrude on your nightmares… because your nightmares fear those vocals.
Yes they do.
