Style: dissonant death metal, technical death metal, experimental death metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gorguts, Car Bomb, Ulcerate
Country: United States-OR
Release date: 31 May 2024
We’re all united here by our love of prog, but there are many different paths to arrive at this grand convergence, and each path affects our current tastes underneath the wide progressive umbrella. Chris, for instance, liked basic bitch hard rock and buttmetal but then developed a functioning adult brain and craved more emotionally mature music; Cooper’s dad introduced him to the style, and he was drawn toward the challenges of playing and composing prog metal; Sam loves his online community of prog metal friends. For me, as soon as I entered the world, I knew I needed complexity, crazy solos, and long songs whose twists defied my expectations. That early desire for outright instrumental, as opposed to effete emotional, complexity is what instantly got me hooked on technical death metal, and Eden Through is the twisted musings of a malevolent tech death god. As I’m a reviewer with a predisposition for this, do Aseitas deliver?
Aseitas paint a sonic labyrinth for Eden Trough, a collage of ideas without stooping to postmodern unlistenability. The music sounds so warped it feels as if the quartet composed for the studio with strange splices, jumps, and timbres. I’ll listen along to a riff and suddenly the bottom drops out, a beat is skipped, or the complex layers of strings become inextricable; that half the album is played on a fretless guitar certainly increases the uncanny, impossible-to-follow factor, and the fiendish tricks of guitar playing, like the Car Bomb-esque pick-scraping and the little noodly parts in the latter stages of opener “Break the Neck of Every Beautiful Thing”, all sound stitched together from a god’s-eye view. What I mean is that the songwriting unfurls as angular and unfocused, but Aseitas simply have a deeper sense of the song’s flow than on a riff-to-riff basis. Although infinitely dense and always abstruse, the writing on Eden Trough comes together into a single cohesive piece, seemingly against all logic. They take microscopic chunks of other technical metal bands’ strengths—those Car Bomb absurdities, the tones of Lunar Chamber (“Tiamat”), the Meshuggah bottom-end rhythmic chugs, the seemingly edited onslaught of venomous vocals of Dodecahedron, the gnarly dissonant slams of Replicant, their own fretless guitars and songwriting weirdness—and painstakingly patch them together into complete songs which seem to be composed with more intentionality than even your average anal progressive band. Those comparisons are not to call Aseitas derivative, merely to underscore that you need not reinvent the wheel to be innovative in your niche. Because of all the quarreling yet cohesive elements, Eden Trough is exhausting from its density, but it’s incredibly successful with its focus on minutiae.
Therefore, it is praiseworthy that Eden Trough is a bite-sized length of thirty minutes. But every good is weighted with a bad, and the pacing is the true drawback of Eden Trough. The five tracks are split into two pairs by a clichéd Modernist classical interlude (“Null Adam/Null Eve”) replete with dissonant piano and eerie strings. It’s an enjoyable breather, but it feels oddly regressive creatively from Aseitas—I would expect the band to challenge the listener more, so “Null Adam/Null Eve” feels like a bit of a cop out with its “traditional avant-garde”-ness. Additionally, the pair of tracks after the midpoint—“Tiamat” and “Alabaster Bones”—are by far the best on the short album, leaving the first half of the album to fester a bit on repeated listens despite their strong qualities.
Those back two tracks, though, shatter my expectations for Aseitas even with my love of their 2018 self-titled opus. Unlike mediocre dissonant death metal acts, Aseitas don’t forget to bring memorable riffs like the stupid polyrhythmic impossibilities at the start of “Alabaster Bones,” the slick riffs at 3:40 in “Tiamat,” and the crazy tempo shifts in the final minutes of the album. The band does things I still can’t really wrap my head around, too, like the weird little guitar trem run at 2:38 in “Tiamat” and the entire extended solo section from 6:00-8:00 in that track; the seamless transition to acoustic guitars after that is the cherry on top.
My puny mortal brain is not cut out for technicality like this, and I love it. Eden Trough isn’t perfect—while the songwriting is intricately composed, I’m still a bit letdown they don’t stick with some of the more successful riffs for longer—but it does remind me of when I was wide-eyed and just stepping into the prog world for the first time: a sense of elusiveness and awe permeates Eden Trough.
Recommended tracks: Tiamat, Alabaster Bones
You may also like: Altarage, Replicant, Unsouling, Warforged, Lunar Chamber, Nightmarer, Convulsing
Final verdict: 7.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page
Label: Total Dissonance Worship – Bandcamp | Facebook
Aseitas is:
– Nathan Nielson (vocals)
– Gage Dean (guitar, bass, vocals)
– Travis Forencich (guitar (fretless, acoustic, electric), piano, synth, field recordings, bass, vocals)
– Zach Rodrigues (drums, percussion)
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