INDIVIDUAL THOUGHT PATTERNS

Death's importance to both death metal and progressive metal is undoubted. Chuck's band practically invented almost all death metal characteristics, such as gory lyrics, raw and extreme music played as fast as one's could, etc, etc, etc. However, starting in Spiritual Healing, Death's music started to slowly change: in Spiritual Healing the gory lyrics were (almost) completely dropped and the Splatter Movie theme were changed by more tangible (or human) affairs, in Human, besides the absense of the gore, the music started to get increasingly complex, better played and more artsy, approaching progressive metal in various ways.

Although following Human in many features, Individual Through Patters is somewhat not as good or as original, and that has many possible causes, but i'll only number two that I consider more important. The first one that can be noted is the bigger running time: Individual Through Patters clocks a bit more than 40 minutes, wile Human clocks only 34 minutes, and that extra time counts a LOT (usually negatively, in my opinion) when it comes to extreme music like we have here (death metal with prog infliences). The second cause is that this is a transition album between death metal with prog influences and progressive death metal, so it stays in the middle of both without having their best characteristics altogether: it has the short song duration and the lack of diversity of death metal wile being less brutal, something that is definitely negative.

It is also important to note that Individual Through Patterns sounds somehow close to Human and, due to that, some tend to day that Individual Through Patterns is not a good album, bu I disagree: despite the flaws, mentioned in the paragraph before, and the similarity to Human in some way, Chuck was still able to deliver great (extreme) music with lots of awesome riffs and kick-ass guitar solos, desregarding what naysayers tell about this album.

Highlights go to Overactive Imagination, Trapped in a Corner, Mentally Blind, Destiny, Out of Touch and The Philosopher.

Grade and Final Thoughts

Still searching for a musical identity, Chuck Schuldiner and Death released Individual Through Patterns, a transition album that is not as good as the album that preceded it and the album that came after it. Yet, not being a masterpiece does not means that an album is worthless, it only means that it is (at least) good. Therefore, thrash this album just because it is not as good as the other post-Human Death album is not only wrong, but extremely unfair. For that matter, this very album is worth 4 stars.

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