Style: deathcore, mathcore (mostly harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Frontierer, The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, The Dillinger Escape Plan
Country: Pennsylvania, United States
Release date: 10 January 2025
Of the many strange effects the Internet has had on global music culture, one of the most paradoxical has to be the simultaneous acceleration and stagnation of distinct music scenes. Nowadays, bands pray not for record or tour deals but for TikTok virality. As such, trends live and die by the algorithm, and what sees success one week lives in the gutters the next. At the same time though, nostalgia has never been more prevalent. Anemoia, nostalgia for a time in which you never lived, thrives in the Internet age, and its effects can be seen in the success of bands like Greta Van Fleet and The Sword. Like a snake eating its tail, when these two phenomena combine the results eventually loop back in on themselves.
And it seems like the revival of aughts-era deathcore is finally here in the form of Gnostician’s debut Unification As An Art. Instrumentally, Gnostician plays a style of acerbic mathy hardcore that reminds me most of the hyper-aggressive Frontierer although they eschew the more hardcore-leaning vox for a vocal approach that sounds straight from Myspace-era deathcore. Regarding its general aesthetic and with features from members of The Last Ten Seconds of Life and Arsonists Get All The Girls, Unification as an Art feels equally as much a love letter to the math- and deathcore scene of years past as it does an attempt to revive it in the modern age.
Like a lot of deathcore, Gnostician’s general ethos on Unification As An Art seems to favor a track’s vocals above all else. For their short run times, these tracks stuff in a hefty amount of lyrics surely deep enough to drown in, yet opaque enough to be completely inaccessible to me in my several listens. Thankfully, I can’t even understand them half the time as the vocal deliveries across this album are downright vitriolic. Ranging from the blackened shrieks that echo throughout the album’s intro’s blast beats on “Corpus I: Prima Lux” to the burly gutturals that adorn the nearly constant breakdowns across the album, the vocal variety is really something to admire. Unfortunately, Gnostician may have pushed the envelope too far; I personally found the nearly constant multi-tracked vocals ear fatiguing in the album’s back half. Multi-tracked harshes are cool and all, but sometimes nothing beats a raw solitary vocal take like in the outro of The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza’s “The Alpha the Omega.” To Gnostician’s credit, it does make good use of a spoken vocal style on tracks like “Alkazoth” and “Evaprosthetic,” breaking through the wall of gutturals and standing out in my memory.
In addition to the heady lyrics, Unification As An Art often features moments of a more cerebral compositional style that elevate the album above the traditional deathcore fare; from the already mentioned blackened atmospherics of “Corpus I: Prima Lux” to the Mastodon-esque outro of “Coagulara, Crown of the Sun” and the hip hop laden intro of “The Seventh Cycle,” each of these tracks stand head and shoulders above their peers thanks to these moments (although the latter may get too close to coworker-core for many to wholeheartedly enjoy). In fact, I found myself fiending for more moments like these on the more straight ahead cuts like “Alembic in Nature” and “Dwarf Star Partition” where I found the band’s traditional approach once again fatiguing. In any sort of -core genre, I love hearing wild experimentation, so I’d love to see what Gnostician could do if they took the same approach to their composition as they did their lyric writing.
Ultimately, I enjoyed Unification As An Art, and if it weren’t for a few missteps regarding vocal production and a few dud tracks, I’d have loved it. So while Gnostician may not have successfully revived Myspace-era deathcore, they may just be summoning something greater just so long as they keep their fervent creative energy alive and really let it run loose.
Recommended tracks: Corpus I: Prima Lux; Alkazoth; Coagulara, Crown of the Sun
You may also like: Under the Pier, The Dali Thundering Concept
Final verdict: 6.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Independent
Gnostician is:
– Zach Perry
– Hunter Derr
– Ben Pypiak
– Christopher Valentin
– Logan Beaver
