ILLOGICIST

It wouldn't take long for Remy Curtaz to jump ship after recording SUBJECTED leaving only Luca Minieri as a founding member. After recruiting drummer Sergio Ponti, ILLOGICIST embarked on a massive tour of Italy and Europe and has become a staple in European technical death metal ever since. This is a band that means business and it all started with this very debut featured a bedazzling array of nine tracks that bantered and brutalized the senses of nearly 39 minutes of punishing pummelation and raucous riffing rage. This is one of those bands that has the need for speed and SUBJECTED will, well, subject you to a ceaseless blitzkrieg frenzy of some of the most demanding death metal the genre has to dish out.

The album starts with a short intro of a faint scream from the distance before bursting into a neoclassical style of progressive technical death metal that sounds like what you could expect if Necrophagist met Death and perhaps a more thundering galloping thrash metal band like early Sadus. As far as the technical death metal riffing is concerned, ILLOGICIST delvers a relentless procession of fast-tempo speedfests that offer a dizzying array of proggy time signature deviations and hairpin curves well beyond anything Death, Atheist or Pestilence ever dreamed of however Minieri's raspy screamed vocals do evoke a rather pissed off Chuck Schuldiner having a very bad day! The insane infusion of crazy time-signature riffage though is off the charts with a never-ending chugging in glitch time with fluid frills and fills finding their way into the nooks and crannies of this speed freak's wet dream come true.

While the guitar neck melting finger breaking distorted bombast of the riffs is the strongest suit going for ILLOGICIST on SUBJECTED, the screamed vocals actually carry profundity as this band eschews worship of Satan or horror, gore and blood but rather engages in the abstract existential quandaries of spirituality and philosophy. In other words, this is nerd metal through and through! Also mentionable is Curtaz's drumming ferociousness as he is as relentless at pummeling his drum kit into oblivion as is the guitar and bass freneticism. For whatever reason Curtaz never performed with other bands after departing so perhaps he had some health issue or lost interest but he certainly delivered some of the most relentless demanding time precision drumming skills not too far from the virtuosity of percussive wizards such as Virgil Donati.

The twin guitar attacks really add a ferocity well beyond what a single axe could pull making this an unforgiving wild roller coaster ride on the top of a speed train. This is really as demanding as technical and progressive death metal really gets. If these guys played any faster it would be imperceptible and considered noise (although some might think that already!) For those well steeped in the knotty angular brutality of technical death metal and love the most relentless of the lot then ILLOGICIST actually delivers a rather logical slab of molten metal on full fueled adrenaline mode for an entire album's run with SUBJECTED. While the lineup would never remain the same for long and ILLOGICIST would deliver two more albums before disappearing from the scene, this debut is a force to be reckoned with.

Illogicist - The Unconsciousness Of Living

A quick definition: Italian Death - the band - copycat. At first, there is a giant scale difference between sounding like Death and being a Death copycat. I did like their previous two albums. Same style, very technical lines, not a masterpiece, I can't remember any song from them but no problem, is the kind of album I know if I try again in the future it would be a funny listen. Then some years later, The Unconsciousness Of Living appears and I went "Oh, Illogicist. Let's see what happens now." And that's it. The riffs and musical structure, the Chuck Schuldiner vocalist wannabe (and his voice is almost there, really), this non-brutal but highly skillful playing, and all the rest, they are pretending to be Death. Many times I realized stolen riffs and passages almost identical to Death or another band from the same gang. Otherwise, the musician's level could be a catchy detail. The recording quality is flawless. It's just a question of... Uninspired virtuocity.

The music on the album is technical death metal. It´s not of the brutal kind but rather a very nineties Death (the band) influenced type of technical death metal. The influences is actually worn so much on the sleeve that the music at times could be mistaken for being Death playing. That will probably please some fans of that particular band but personally I think Illogicist badly need an identity of their own and it has some impact on my overall enjoyment of the album. There´s no discussion that the music is well played, well produced and as such well composed, But I stand by my words when I say that there is little here that can be called original. You got the fast death/thrashy riffing, techncially well played guitar solos, sneering high pitched growling, semi-progressive song structures and a very skilled rythm section.

The well playing band and the overall professional production and songwriting does warrant a 3.5 star (70%) rating, but if you are not content with listening to what is basically a Death clone (hell the vocalist even sounds like Chuck Schuldiner did in the mid-nineties), I´d get my technical/progressive death metal kicks elsewhere.

Illogicist stole my heart a couple of years back with their second album 'The Insight Eye'. With technical ferocity, strong hooks in the songwriting, and an organic sense of production that seemed to go against the trends of modern tech death, I found myself very impressed by what these Italians could conjure with a style of metal I usually do not find so appealing. 'The Unconsciousness Of Living' is Illogicist's third effort, and they are in form, more or less. Again, this band releases some very chaotic and cerebral death metal; very much the same thing that they have done before. It is for this very reason that despite Illogicist's consistent technical wizardry, I don't find myself quite as drawn towards this album as I did their earlier work.

Had I not heard the work of Illogicist before, I could see myself falling in love with 'The Unconsciousness Of Living'. The music that this band makes may be best aligned with the progressive, philosophical sounds of a band like Death, but Illogicist's sound can be defined and distinguished apart from their peers, and that is something I would not say often for death metal. The band has a very dynamic sense of rhythm in their music; each of these songs sees the band go from slower, gloomy chugging, to near-thrash intensity. All of this is bound by a real sense of composition in Illogicist's music. The time signature changes here are fast and frequent, and fans of highly technical metal will find a treasure chest of well fleshed out ideas here. The band's ability to play and perform these riffs is no slouch either; guitarists Ambrosi and Minieri wow me with a seemingly unrelenting barrage of off-time riffs. The bass work in the album is phenomenal, and Illogicist make the bold statement to have their bassist clearly heard in the mix, and only to their benefit. The drumming of Illogicist is the most conventional aspect of the band's sound, but well played. I would have more good things to say about Alessandro Tinti's work if the mixing had not sought to push it so far into the background.

Really, Illogicist's work here is incredible, from a technical and compositional perspective. Even so, the fact remains that nothing has changed from 'The Insight Eye'. Over the course of years, one would think that the band may have added a new degree or development to their music, but no; I am hearing almost the exact same sound as I did before, and instead of loving every second of it, I get a somewhat disappointing sense of deja vu. Splitting hairs, there is more of an emphasis on technicality here, but I find that this comes at a loss of the hooks that made 'The Insight Eye' such a delight for me. With repeated listens, large aspects of this album's sound become recognizable and familiar, but I would have maybe preferred to have heard a little more variety and sense of surprise on the record. Also worthy of mention is the fact that throughout the entire album, I think I only heard one guitar tone, that being the same one that the band has used in the past. The positive angle of this is that Illogicist do have a strong grasp of one sound, but the lack of variety fails to inspire me the way my first experience with the band did.

This lack of progress forward aside, 'The Unconsciousness Of Living' is an incredibly accomplished technical death metal record, and its positive aspects- of which there are many- cannot be ignored. Someone who has not yet heard this band should be amazed by what Illogicist offers, and even to existing fans such as myself, their work here certainly does not disappoint. With a twist or slightest change in their formula however, I think I would have been a lot more impressed.

Now this is something that really deserves the label 'progressive death metal.' Blistering rhythms, harsh vocals and technical showmanship all come out to play here, and what comes out of the deal is a heavy monster of a work, that while not having much variety in terms of dynamic; is filled with intellligence in all of it's atonal, schizophrenic beauty.

One of the things that really stood out to me (to the point of blowing me away) was the perfect integration and counterpoint of guitar/bass riffage. While most bassists have the dubious honour of being little more than a figure on stage being almost too quiet and droned out to hear, the bass gets plenty of time to pop up and amaze, in between the technical guitar parts. The rhythm guitars are everything you would expect; polyrhythmic and strange chords abound. With the lead generally throwing a layer of extra 'melody' on top, it ends up feeling like a pretty complete work from a technical metal perspective. The vocals -while certainly upholding the tradition of death metal- are not especially memorable and seem to fade behind the brilliant instrumental work being done. While Illogicist does not have many 'catchy' melodies at work here, that is not to say it is not memorable; there are plenty of moments here that really struck a 'chord' with me, and I couldn't help but press the 'rewind' button back a few seconds to have my mind blown again.

While other bands of the genre like Opeth and Cynic earned the progressive label by adopting different styles into the mix and adding a dash of melody, Illogicist sticks to a purely metal theme and elaborates on it. To this effect, some might not want to listen to forty minutes of an unrelenting metal onslaught, but if you have an independant appreciation for metal on it's own, then this is certainly to check out.