CRYPTIC SHIFT steer death metal to the outer limits.
Visitations From Enceladus BLOOD HARVEST
Pan-dimensional death explorers beam in to blow minds WHILE ITS CORE
sonic values seldom waver, death metal has always been pliable, and recent times have thrown up all manner of perverse new readings of the form. Cryptic Shift’s profoundly psychedelic and experimental approach may offer superficial echoes of
Blood Incantation’s cosmic brutality, but Visitations From Enceladus is very much its own unhinged, escapist beast.
There’s something deliciously cocky about starting your debut album with a 26-minute prog-death colossus.
Moonbelt Immolator is extraordinary; from surreal, dissonant, freeform overture and shape-shifting riff barrage to sparse but proggy breakdown and beyond, it certainly sounds like DM from another dimension, even if the band themselves are, in reality, from Leeds. The song’s second half is even more bewildering, with countless twisted twists, churning turns and jolting changes of pace. With a gritty and raw but shrewdly crisp production, every wild about-turn and disorientating sidestep hits the target while simultaneously sounding on the brink of chaos. One minute shy of Reign In Blood’s entire duration, Moonbelt Immolator ends with a defiant, hyper-distorted hiss, and you may wonder where Cryptic Shift could possibly go from here.
Impressively, they have more straightforward death metal material too, albeit still vastly more inventive and progressive than the majority of their contemporaries could muster. (Petrified In The) Hypogean Gaol, The Arctic Chasm and Planetary Hypnosis are all mind-expanding mini-symphonies of, as their creators would have it, “phenomenal, technicological astro-death”. At times old school to the bone and pointedly melodic, at others magnificently obscure and violent, this would all be absurdly exciting without the stunning artwork, laudably preposterous underlying concept and a near-chewable sense that Cryptic Shift are genuinely out of their minds. With all of that included, this is simply one of the strongest and most gloriously berserk metal debuts in living memory.
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FOR FANS OF: Blood Incantation, Vektor, Voivod
DOM LAWSON