Hey! It’s been quite a while, isn’t it? I can’t believe that five days have passed and I couldn’t gather eight new albums to listen to. I must’ve been a bit lazy. In any case, let’s kick today’s edition of Mini-Reviews!

First up, Chung Antique is a math rock trio from Washington, and Artesian Swell/Norse Code is a single release on vinyl. With only two songs, the thing is pretty short, and I’ve got to say that their take on the genre isn’t clicking with me. Maybe it’s their punkish approach or the overload of repetitions present in their song, but something just makes me go ‘meh‘.
It Only Gets Worse only seem to get better with each release. The experimental electronics band from Alabama have released many songs and albums, since 2014’s Creation Myths, with their heart-wrenching ambient aesthetics and spoken word. I’ve always loved their music, but their new album raises the bar even higher. Angels comes out on October tenth, and it’s an obligatory listen.
Glyptoglossio is a strange new beast. It’s a pretty much flawless avant-garde technical death metal record, instrumentally, but then they decided to superimpose a robotic voice narrating the music with its science-fiction storyline. That’s really unfortunate because the music itself is amazing. I guess I don’t get their vocal experiment, or at the very least I don’t enjoy it. If you can endure it, please go ahead and buy the album, but I can barely stand their ‘proklamations’.
Note: this is a stream for their previous album, Abstractionnisme. Les ténèbres murmurent mon nom comes out on October eighteenth. Incandescence‘s newborn makes it a bit hard for me to appreciate. While I do enjoy black metal, I’m really turned off by the more traditional scene, and really turned on by the progressive, avant-garde, and experimental scenes. Unfortunately, their material falls into the former category, and the progressive aspects they try to bring it are just too shy to my tastes. The musicianship is on point on everyone, but the genre itself is just not for me. Consider it, if you’re more of a trad person yourself!
Oathbreaker have been acclaimed pretty much all throughout the blogosphere, recently, for their new album, Rheia. This one comes out on September thirtieth, and is the formation’s third release. The clash of post-hardcore blast beats and more atmospheric, melodic passages are not unlike what early Opeth was doing with death metal and acoustic sections, but here it sort of falls flat. The sung parts are emotive and poignant, and I think that the pitch-imperfect vocals are there to push that feeling, but, you know, singing the note is actually better to get emotions out of music than singing around it. It’s not a bad album, but it’s definitely not on the level to which it has been elevated…

Construct of Lethe is a progressive death/black metal from Virginia, and they’re releasing The Grand Machination on October seventh. It’s bad. The riffs are a rehash of what the genre already offered, and of themselves too, which makes listening to the album tiring and unnerving. On top of that, the vocals exhibit an utterly bizarre timbre, unlike any I’ve heard before, but not in a good way. Overall, an album to forget.
This, however, is one I like very much. Special Providence‘s Essence of Change came out last year, but that’s not an excuse to let it fly by unnoticed (the band is working on new material, too!) It’s a progressive fusion metal album that really seems to take the ‘theme-and-improvisation’ method of jazz and applying heavier music to it. In this case, progressive metal not too far off from Exivious or Cthulhu Rise. It’s a great and fun album, and you should go and try it.

Finally, Noise Trail Immersion is a mathcore band from Italy. Womb conceptually revolves around, well, the womb, and birth. It makes me think of Amia Venera Landscape and The Arusha Accord at the same time, and seem to bridge the gap between post-hardcore and progressive metalcore, with an added mathematics element, as well as a healthy dose of dissonance. The album is just really good, and you should do yourself the favour of listening to it in its entirety!