The New York band Artificial Brain have made a speciality of a technical death metal turned toward space, alienation and science fiction. This self-titled album, presented as the last with their long-standing singer Will Smith, closes a chapter with panache. The critics (an 83 average across eight reviews) hail a work in which technical mastery finally serves emotion in full.
For Artificial Brain have never been a mere band of virtuosos. Beneath the volleys of blast beats and dissonant riffs surfaces a glacial melancholy, an atmosphere of spatial drift that gives the whole a singular colour. The cavernous growls, atmospheric layers and tortured leads compose a picture of almost clinical coldness, yet strangely moving.
Musically, the album favours atmosphere over display. The tortuous compositions allow for melodic breaths, almost contemplative passages where the chaos suspends itself. The clear, deep production lets each detail of a playing of confounding precision be heard. One thinks of an end-of-the-world death metal, at the edges of the sidereal void.
The flip side of this technicality is a certain coldness that at times holds the listener at a distance: the album demands several listens before yielding its treasures, and its density may discourage. But the effort is rewarded.
Verdict: 8/10. A demanding, dizzying record, the summit of a technical death metal that thinks in terms of space and solitude. A farewell worthy of the name.
