Style: Progressive Death/Thrash Metal (harsh vocals)
Review by: Callum
Country: Germany
Release date: October 30, 2020
Since forming in the 90s, Subconscious have transformed their sound. They started with a form of progressive thrash metal with a strange Primus flavor, to adopting a more traditional death metal style with some thrash and progressive elements. Their latest effort, The Inevitable, is slightly more straightforward than previous releases, and thankfully production quality is leaps and bounds ahead of where they were with Veil (2015).
The intro to the record uses ambient noise and synths, as well as a severe weather alert klaxon, to build a fair amount of suspense suggesting that some cataclysmic event was imminent. Instead, the title track, “The Inevitable”, drops in with a reasonably heavy riff but vocal growls that make all this anticipation fall flat. Langenfeld’s vocals unfortunately hold the entire record back. They have that interesting strain heard in the harsh vocals from Xanthochroid, but here they sound just too weak amongst the heavy instruments. Speaking of flat, the production on the record, while an improvement on previous releases, doesn’t have a lot of color to it outside of the clean instrumental sections like in the jazz interlude section of “Decayed Water”. Improvements to this may have made choruses or the breakdown in “Howling” more impactful.
The ‘progressive elements’ throughout the record often feel like attempts to tick boxes on a list of prog-metal tropes rather than stylistically fitting components. The aforementioned jazz-lounge interlude comes totally out of left-field and I don’t understand the worth of including it, especially when an actual interlude track follows directly after. The robotic vocal effects are questionable in their relevance, and I wonder whether the second breakdown in “Howling” was really necessary.
The guitar work is definitely a redeeming quality on this album. The riffs are of a consistently good quality for a death metal album. The highlights are when they play around with timing in tracks like “Soulless” and “Darkness”. Guitar harmonies and the few scattered solos are also great, and there are still glimmers of Les Claypool from their first albums heard in the bass lines in tracks like “Lifetime Failure”. There’s also a Blotted Science style riff in that track, and the drums in the extended outro keep you guessing, which adds some much needed dynamism. While I find myself toe-tapping to a lot of this record, production issues and vocals are holding it back from being much better than an awkward Death-influenced thrash blend with smatterings of dodgy prog elements.
Recommended tracks: Lifetime Failure, Soulless, Darkness
Recommended for fans of: Death, Cynic, Xanthochroid
Final verdict: 5/10
Related links: Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Gallery Records – Metal-Archives page
Subconscious is:
– Gernot Schwab (Bass)
– Konrad Ponto (Drums)
– Fabian Streich (Guitars)
– Jörn Langenfeld (Vocals/Guitars)
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