another overly generous review—this time of an Italian death metal band's debut

The influences are classic, but new life runs through these veins

 

Miscreance debut a heavily and colorfully barbed wire of sound on Convergence. The opener “Flame of Consciousness” represents the album well—pointy riffs, deft musicianship, roaring vocals, impatient songwriting, slips of atmospheric interludes, and wildly smooth guitar solos.

 

Forty-two seconds into the second song, “Fall Apart,” a studded few moments of rapid double-bass drumming carry a ready-fire riff. Ten seconds later, the riff changes, and the throat opens up, roaring verbal warfare. And at 3 minutes the mood falls into the young dawn with a guitar solo rising in gorgeous tone.

 

“My Internment” opens with a staircase-climbing dual-guitar riff over a hokey and fun deep voice-over, but from atop the stairs come some of the album’s best vocals—raw, animalistic—enough to terrorize the neighborhood. And at 3:00, Miscreance finally finds a riff that can move you, and the band plays out the song.

 

The young Italians' white-high-top metal recalls genre pioneers Death. Miscreance also cites Atheist and Sadus as influences. But this young band is fresh. The only issue with Convergence is that, over and again on the album, the fun stops as quickly as it starts, and at times it seems no riff is too small.

 

The band issued a demo called From Awareness to Creation in 2018 and put three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last November. Convergence was released September 19, 2022, in three formats via Unspeakable Axe Records, Danex Records, and Desert Wastelands Productions. The band plans to tour Europe with Chilean band Ripper in 2023.

 

(posts) Car Bomb's video for "Black Blood"

something about Yngwie Malmsteen's "Relentless: The Memoir"

Yngwie Malmsteen rips up the fretboard, exacting from his guitars a patented metallic neo-classical dazzle. And he is versatile, being more than capable of playing blues, composing classical scores, writing lyrics, arrangements, anything. But shredding classical-style is his bread and butter.

The guy's seemingly limitless ability is matched only by his unlimited ego. And in Relentless, Malmsteen plays us briskly through his life's song, tooting his own horn all along way.

Malmsteen starts with his childhood in Sweden, where at a young age he zeroed-in on guitar and practiced and played his way into the local music scene. After entering his recordings in a guitar magazine contest, he was recruited to play in an American band. Not one to stand stageside, Malmsteen quickly established himself as a musical entity unto himself. His is not a fascinating history, really, but he is a unique-enough guy to make it worthwhile to listen to his version of it. That is, it is worthwhile if you like rock autobiographies and are not bothered by the company of an elitist prick.


Note:

• While Malmsteen's playing is universally acknowledged for its technical brilliance, the sound is often dismissed as "souless."
• He spends a good chunk of time late in the book admiring his custom equipment. He shamelessly endorses anything and everything with his name on it.

 

(posts) Meshuggah's "Dancers To A Discordant System"