I have accumulated many personal reviews while listening to albums. My reviewing style is non-conventional and was only intended for myself. Sometimes I will only use one sentence to describe an album if I feel that is all that's required. Other times I will review an album while I'm still listening to it, leading to a song-by-song review of the album (bringing the size of the review to nearly dissertation-level). There are times when I will even come back to a review to add information that I didn't know when originally writing the review. The point is that I won't edit my reviews to make them more readable or conventional. My reviews are always a direct result of what I was feeling when I wrote them and I want to let that feeling come through.



Showing posts with label Anomalous. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anomalous. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Anomalous - Ohmnivalent [2011]

Shiiit. The technicality is just as maddening as the last album, maybe even more so. The keyboard and effects are still there in fairly large quantity for Death Metal. Atmospheric keys contrast nicely with the madness of the Tech. Death Metal. Ahhh, when "The Seraphim Veil" drops into clean guitars briefly, I know now that any fears I had that this album won't live up to the hopes set by the first one have been made into dust. The soft and light sections blend so amazingly well into the structure that it freaks me out. Now, it seems I can finally put my finger on it: Technical Death Metal with elements Dark Ambient and Progressive Metal. The production is incomparable to the previous album... very powerful, punchy, yet delicate at times. The main vox are a tiny bit low in the mix, but the wall of sound attitude really makes up for it. It is a bit long, though, and it doesn't feel quite as fresh as the first album.

Rating: 8.5

http://www.myspace.com/anomalousmetal

All ratings are out of 10. Rating may not be a whole number.
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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Anomalous - Cognitive Dissonance [2006]

Eerie intro. Kicks in hard and fast. Not a fan of the production, but it's tolerable. Technical as fuck. Damn cool use of effects and keys. The song structure is unique. Goes from hard and fast to light and then right back. Pretty creative stuff. There's a glimpse of genius in the second track at times with the stop-go song structure combined with crazy weird atmospheric keys and effects. Track 2 bleeds into 3 in a stunningly beautiful way and really pushes this album into the Avant Guarde category. The 3rd track is really where this goes from a cool-but-average technical death metal wank to a quite superior technical death metal wank. 3 bleeds into 4. 4 is fucking amazing right from the start and it really seems to be the pinnacle of their style on this album so far. Holy shit, 5 is amazing. Ends with the exact same effects as the cd began. Overall, the Cd is front-loaded with a couple mediocre songs (it's like a light introduction to their style), but it fucking ends strong as hell and makes me feel like I've just been on some insane death metal journey. The production quality is what really holds this album back.

Rating: 8

http://www.myspace.com/anomalousmetal

All ratings are out of 10. Rating may not be a whole number.
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