Style: dissonant death metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Gorguts, Portal
Country: United States
Release date: 17 January 2025
Our fine blog started when our glorious founder, Sam, wanted to share the fruits of his labor: searching for underground prog metal on the cesspit—and also excellent database—known as Encyclopedia Metallum. A universal experience of somebody who has become truly immersed in metal is trolling Metallum for finds in the benthos of the genre, and while our blog aspires to help you avoid that, we still have to do the dirty work for you. And sometimes pages for bands or people stick out to you for being particularly interesting; for instance, Voidsphere’s album and song naming convention has always amused me and my musical nemesis (but that’s a story for a different day) Kosm has a seriously insane release schedule. But I think Jared Moran, drummer and vocalist of Hierarchies, has the singularly craziest page I’ve come across. Like many, I became acquainted with his work through the dissodeath act Acausal Intrusion, but he is listed as being a member in well over 100 different projects, most of which are some form of death metal or grindcore with the odd black metal band sprinkled in. And he’s in so many projects that it seems he’s run out of English words to use for naming them: seriously, Qqgcguvhjn is a terrible band name. You’d expect somebody who drums, plays guitar and bass, and performs vocals in so many bands is absolutely wrung out creatively—he certainly is with naming his projects—but does Hierarchies reveal a lack of musical ideas or is it, against all odds, fresh? (And let’s not forget about the other two guys Anthony Wheeler and Nicholas Turner who also are in multiple projects but seem to be slightly more focused on the oddball doom band Dwelling Below as well as Acausal Intrusion).
The trio’s style of dissodeath seems like they could release a million versions of this album because their choice of notes and rhythms is irrelevant—I suppose one could argue they have endless creativity in that regard. I listen to a lot of dissonant stuff, and the worthwhile releases from groups like Ad Nauseam and Ulcerate are incredibly intricately composed, as much Modernist classical music as death metal; similarly, the genre allows for ample room for artistic improvisation like the noise-jazz freakouts of Imperial Triumphant or acts like Ingurgitating Oblivion who border on so abstruse it may as well be improv. Hierarchies, on the other hand, seem like they don’t write at all, relying on jagged free improvisation techniques to generate their cacophony. This can work—heck, I like the music of Anthony Braxton, and John Coltrane’s Ascension is one of my favorite albums—but it requires a level of musicality Hierarchies completely lacks. I understand that achieving the level of hipster-y and artistic lunacy that Hierarchies aims for requires a level of “musical campness” where the rhythms and dissonance appear random and slightly off, but this just sounds like a group of skilled—but very, very high—teenagers trying to replicate Gorguts’s Obscura by memory. If that sounds like your thing (no judgement), you’ll pretty much love Hierarchies, but either the songwriting or performances (and preferably both) need to be tighter for this to work for me.
Heck, Hierarchies hardly stay in rhythm, and so when they try Ad Nauseam-esque sections like at 2:40 into “Vultures,” it sounds like poor pastiche rather than a legitimately interesting take on the genre. Hierarchies often falls into this same problem. The genre that they play is supposed to be boundary-pushing and “avant-garde,” but Hierarchies are remarkably comfortable at being a clearly inferior version of Gorguts and Portal. For all its inscrutable dissonance and its high bar for entry, Hierarchies simply lacks bite.
I’ll give Hierarchies the credit that there are definitely riffs at least—many such nebulously dissonant acts lack even those. Even though it’s all a bit awkward, the first few minutes of opener “Entity” have plenty of sections with interesting “melodic” phrasing before the inevitable transition into pseudo-intellectual nonsense. Additionally, the chromatic shred at the start of “Dimension” and the changing-tempo wank near the end of “Abstract” are standout guitar solos from the haphazard chaos. Thankfully, Hierarchies also has intriguing production, and apart from a slightly too brutal death metal-coded snare tone, I can actually pick up the skronkiness of the intertwining guitar and bass—I cannot say the same of most unsuccessful dissodeath bands.
Even with a couple friends, it’s gotta be near impossible to have novel ideas for riffs with a hundred different projects, so it’s natural that Jared Moran and co adopted a style of dissonant death metal that sounds spontaneously generated. But at the end of the day, why listen to high Gorguts (or drunken Ad Nauseam) when you could listen to the real thing?
Recommended tracks: Entity, Dimension
You may also like: Acausal Intrusion, Ingurgitating Oblivion, Jute Gyte, Evelyn, Maere, Ad Nauseam
Final verdict: 4/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Transcending Obscurity Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Nicholas Turner – Guitar
Anthony Wheeler – Bass
Jared Moran – Drums, vocals
