Beats and yelling: Cryoxyd

This World we Live in…
Out 12^th December on Dolorem Records

Mechanical death metal combines elements of clinical industrialism and prog informalities paced out in oddly pulsing sequences. Cryoxyd leverage repetition as an important compositional tool, creating a meditative, almost hyper fixated flow, only to lurch into soaring waves of melodic euphoria. This creates a sense of risk and reward within the music, as it morphs from the unpredictable to the oddly familiar. Pestilence and late 80s technical thrash stand as the most obvious influences, both materially and thematically, as the album’s aesthetic calls back to an older conception of futurism, something borne out by the ponderous, robotic gait of the music.

Production serves this intention well, offering a sterile, germ free environment, allowing each instrument to be delivered with near totalising clarity. Triggered drums work in this context to emphasise artificiality, balanced out by a performance veering from reliable metronomic rhythms to creative patterns that work as organic framing devices. A meaty guitar tone calls back to early digital production aesthetics, here used as an artistic statement working in unison with the music. A sharp bass tone manages to punch through, accenting transitions with micro licks adding a touch of spontaneity to this otherwise mechanistic landscape.

In a sense Cryoxyd salvage progressive era Death by using a similar dialect to Chuck Schuldiner, particularly in terms of lead guitar work, here elevated by a greater sense of adventure and indeed danger. This injects a playful humanity working in stark contrast to many of the riffs which seem deliberately framed to work like synth sequences. In this sense Cryoxyd’s approach is far more ambient than is typical for death metal, despite the anti-atmospheric ethos behind the mix. Linear, galloping passages create space and scope in defiance of the more restrictive, dense riffing of an explicitly death metal lineage.

This carves out a dramatic topography within the music, as vast peeks squeeze their way through troughs of modernist nihilism. Equally striking is the fact that Cryoxyd have maintained such an ambitious scope within a relatively commercial form of death metal. Many of the riffs would be at home on any garden variety melodic pop metal of the last twenty years, lifted and shifted into the context of ‘This World we Live in…’ they take on a sense of mission, a new life and meaning as they engage in a complex dance of competing impulses articulated across this album.