Corridor of Chameleons
Over the past few decades, the world of extreme music has not only shifted with the times, but evolved to accommodate and embrace the sometimes-staggering advances in technology that have taken place, bestowing upon the creative and the ambitious the ability to push themselves to new levels of technical innovation. Swiss quartet Mycelia are a band whose influences are all relatively modern, fusing highly technical death metal with progressive and experimental leanings; the kind of sound that draws the unrelenting technical ferocity of The Faceless with the more experimental aspects of Between The Buried And Me.
Nova is the product of a band coming-of-age; honing their sound whilst further cultivating new elements and ideas to create a beast wholly more slick and refined than debut effort Isolator. The vision and intent is certainly more transparent this time; the band fully embracing their sci-fi theme by going all-out on the artwork and even sub-categorising the album tracks.
The production is another big step up from their previous work (although a step down from Isolator's derisible sonority would have surely meant leaving the studio windows open and playing the instruments from the building across the road), and although there is an obvious requirement for compression within highly technical music such as this, but the balance (this time under the watchful eye of Clawfinger's Jocke Skog) is never tipped so far as to sound overly synthetic.
For an album so speckled with interludes and atmospheric, instrumental experimentation, Nova surprisingly wastes no time before erupting in a death metal assault on the senses, with opening songs Shmashmortion and Ectoparasite both as uncompromising as they are technically impressive. The frequent breakdowns give the songs a modern, more generic deathcore feel at times, which feels like an unnecessary evil for such a seemingly forward-thinking band.
New ideas begin to appear as the album progresses, with C.O.R.P. adding a dose of melody that works well in principle, yet suffers from slightly weak vocals and some uninspiring songwriting. The interludes provide a welcome respite from the unrelenting death metal and allow the band to experiment with different sounds and atmospherics. The inclusion of dubstep in The Timemasheen comes as no surprise given its previous appearance within Isolator; it still sounds a little misplaced, although less so this time and actually helps to accentuate the sci-fi theme. This ends up becoming the waypoint that announces the much more interesting face of Mycelia, and the remainder of Nova is all the better for it.
The focus and energy of the album suddenly shifts in all the right directions; the intricate guitar work becoming more stimulating, the slap bass stepping up a notch and the drums holding back and letting go at all the right moments. The Golden Ratio is a fitting grand finale; a trio of songs that begins as an instrumental piece shrouded in flits of jazzy piano notes and guitar mastery, becoming an all-encompassing technical metal beast before its cinematic conclusion.
The technical ability on display here is staggering, yet I can't help but notice that the continual surge in popularity of the genre has left me almost desensitised to the complexity on display. So does jaw-dropping ability alone constitute a "good" album, or is something more required? As with classical music, listening to the individual instruments and appreciating the individual skill within the collective composition can be highly rewarding, but with so much music to choose from, the replay value is entirely absent without those memorable moments. Nova represents nothing particularly new or innovative within the genre, yet is a highly impressive thirty minutes of technical prowess and clinical death metal, with enough of those memorable moments and experimentation to break up the at-times monotonous barrage of shifting time signatures and death metal growling. The death metal purists may find themselves less than impressed, but Mycelia clearly have their collective mind set on creating modern, innovative music, the execution of which is as challenging as it is enjoyable. Here's to the future.