It seems like forever ago when Sweden’s Soreption was a contender for my 2014 album of the year with Engineering the Void. The perfect blend of stuttering Meshuggah syncopation and tech death wizardry as well as sudden bursts of orchestral elements just hit m perfectly.
However, the 2018 follow up, Monument of the End, didn’t hit me the same way at all, as it seemed to just lacked something, and I’m a bit bummed out to report that the long-awaited follow up, Jord (‘earth’, ‘dirt’), is in the same rather underwhelming vein.
Once I hit play and opener “The Artificial North” bursts out of the speakers with forceful, stuttering elegance and heft, I’m all in. Then just like that, the album is over. The next 27 minutes, basically seem to be one long song that sounds the same from “The Forever Born” through “The Chasm” to closer “Död Jord”.
There are plenty of mid-paced, stammering, stuttery polyrhythms, there are plenty of solos, and as with prior releases, there are a couple of unexpected orchestral bursts and flourishes, of course, all delivered with top-notch musicianship and Buster Odeholm’s (Humanity Last Breath/Vildjharta) super tight, punchy recording. But hardly a single note of it made my ears perk up, go ‘fuck yes’ or even remember much of it when the bluster is complete.
Even the short, underused symphonic bursts in “Each Death More Hollow”, (with a cool little breakdown that’s one of the few moments that makes me pay attention), “A Story Never Told”, super techy “The Nether World Machine” or “Död Jord” (probably the two most effective, but still short orchestral flourishes) do little to excite me. And that’s not good because I have a raging boner for anything symphonic or orchestral right now (literally…… right NOW).
Jord will certainly have its fans, and deservedly so, these guys are god-tier musicians that should be in the same tier as Meshuggah, but for me, just like its predecessor, it’s a little disappointing. And for tech death in 2022, labelmates, Exocrine has delivered a far more dynamic and memorable album in The Hybrid Suns.
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I’m about to go for a run and listen to this…I felt the same about Monuments of the End as you. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it more than a couple times and to my ears it was because of the overall sound. The playing is all there but the sound was not as good or memorable as Reengineering’s.
Taking Exocrine under advisement! I liked the one album before Maelstrom quite a bit.
on Jun 11th, 2022 at 16:59