Review: The Biscuit Merchant – Tempora

Style: progressive death metal, melodic death metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Alkaloid, Opeth, Blood Incantation, Persefone
Country: Michigan, United States
Release date: 13 June 2025

You see the AI-generated artwork and read the utterly inane band name. You think to yourself, “Here we go with another over-ambitious sci-fi themed zany djent solo-project.” Oh how wrong you are. The Biscuit Merchant isn’t a djent band but rather a one-man prog death project from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Tempora marks his tenth full-length release since debuting in 2017. From the name to the spacefaring artwork, there’s an air of tongue-in-cheek ambition, but beneath the surface is a sincere and sprawling attempt at progressive death metal.

Despite being most easily categorized as progressive (and melodic) death metal, the fusion of genres that The Biscuit Merchant utilizes on Tempora feels a lot more like a tour of the metal scene at large. For every head-bang inducing chugger of a riff (“Victorious” and “Tempora”) there’s a galloping, power-metal tinged melody (“Kill Time” and “Amidakuji”) or a wah-laden, classic rock infused solo (“Uncommon Enemies” and “Judgement Day”). The eclectic fusion of genres ends up sounding something like Alkaloid meets Xoth meets Opeth, but the gravitational force holding Tempora’s disparate influences together is its vocal performance. Both clean and harsh, the vocals give each track a catchy edge that goes great lengths in making the album feel cohesive, despite never employing any overtly technical or flashy techniques. Unfortunately, for as much effort as the vocals put towards making the album’s vast scope cohesive, the song structures do the opposite.

The eight tracks that make up Tempora fall into two categories: those that roughly follow a traditional song structure and those that don’t. My issue lies with the latter. Tracks like “Kill Time” and “Celestial Awakening” each make use of a through-composed structure that falls apart in the songs’ back halves. Riffs are thrown at the listener, and not one seems to follow logically from what came before or flow smoothly into what comes after. This style can be done well—look no farther than BTBAM or last year’s critical darling Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere—but its execution here is too haphazard. The structures of the album’s two longest tracks, “Judgement Day” and “Tempora,” are equally hairy, with the title track finale featuring an entirely unprecedented three-minute surf rock segment that almost made me quit the album entirely. Ideally, a through-composed track has some sort of arc that allows the listener to form expectations about what will come next, and the best bands know when to conform to and when to subvert those expectations. The Biscuit Merchant leans far too heavily on subversion.

Thankfully, when The Biscuit Merchant employs a traditional song structure like on “Victorious” (a shameless rip-off of Opeth’s “Master’s Apprentices”) and “Uncommon Enemies,” The Merchant delivers solid and easily enjoyed bits of progressive death metal. While the instrumental “Amidakuji” goes a bit up its own ass with the number of solos and the intro track “Temporal Delusion” is just an intro track, they too are solid cuts that don’t crumble under unwieldy song structures. Noticeably, these are the four shortest tracks on the album, leaving the vast majority of the record to suffer The Biscuit Merchant’s songwriting woes.

Tempora is certainly an ambitious record, and adventurous metalheads may find individual moments worth dissecting. But for all its energy and genre splicing, Tempora lacks the compositional maturity to tie its parts into a compelling whole. Hopefully, The Biscuit Merchant lets his goods spend a few extra minutes in the oven from here on out.

Recommended tracks: Victorious, Amidakuji, Uncommon Enemies
You may also like: Resuscitate, Xoth, Witch Ripper
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives

Label: independent

The Biscuit Merchant is:
– Justin Lawnchair (everything)