Tech Death Thursday: Raising the Veil
Tech Death Thursday goes to space! It’s time for some Raising the Veil.
…right after some news:
- The well-dressed gents in And The Kingdom Fell just released a new single from their forthcoming album Phantasms, entitled “The Chaos Engine.” It’s oddly bleak for a tech death song, with a somber middle section and some tasteful use of reverb on the leads and vocals. I dig.
- Brazilian death/thrash/prog/tech/whatever outfit Abstracted just put out a four-song EP, featuring guest appearances by Andre Casagrande and Greg Burgess and Mike Stancel of Allegaeon. Ophidian is name-your-price on their Bandcamp, and I encourage those of you who are less tech-inclined to check this one out; you might like what’s there.
- Lost Soul have just announced their fifth album, Atlantis: The New Beginning, will be out October 30th via Apostasy Records. They also released a short teaser of some pre-production material and it’s, uh, weird. Check it out here. (h/t Jack Bauer)
- If you like to watch good guitarists being good at guitar, Irreversible Mechanism have a guitar playthrough of “Cold Winds” off their debut from earlier this year.
- Abhorrent Decimation have a preview of their upcoming album up here, complete with purple-shit-flying-through-space artwork. Miasmic Mutation will be out September 25th and can be preordered right hmyah.
(Full stream at NCS)
I’m always impressed when a band can take an established formula and make it sound like it’s entirely their own. Besides the fact that it shows incredible compositional skill, it makes the music that much easier to get into. There’s enough familiarity there that you immediately feel at home with the sound, but it still feels new, like you’re being introduced to the style all over again.
Featuring members of Necrophagist and Monument of Misanthropy, it should come then as no surprise that Raising the Veil pulls this off seemingly without effort. Their sound sits squarely between Necrophagist and Obscura, but set in the modern tech death paradigm. The music carries the sinister nature of the former, but it’s expressed in a much more melodic way as per the latter. Each song is laden with hooks; from the opening blast of “Compactor of Structure” to the pummeling theme of “Qubit Computed Multiverse,” these are some of the stickiest riffs anyone in the genre has put forth this year.
The band makes smart use of synths throughout the album as well. There are a lot of leads present that could have been performed on a guitar that have instead been played (or programmed) on lead and piano voices, adding a lot of texture to a sound that could have been otherwise mundane. It gives the album an otherworldly aura, but not in a floating, ethereal way like Fallujah; this is more like getting dragged through a wormhole and into a warp storm.
Bosonic Quantvm Phenomena is an absolutely killer album and shouldn’t be missed by any self-respecting tech death-head. You can pick it up here with a remastered version of their debut EP as a bonus.
That’s all for now. Until next time,
(Image VIA)
