Band's List Melodic Death Deathred Senses Paramount Flowing Into Darkness

Deathred’s new album, Senses Paramount Flowing Into Darkness, is the same as their previous album in a lot of ways. Each song is comprised entirely of a riff going nowhere, hardly changing from track to track, topped off with a steely, icy production that would make a black metal freak cream themselves. Also, there's no vocalist. Technically speaking, though, everything is as top notch as before.

The most remarkable thing about the album is that it is ten minutes long and released as a ‘full-length’. I guess in a sense I can be happy about this, seeing as the previous album with all the numbers for a title is pretty tough to get through despite only being twenty-five minutes long. There are seven tracks here, only one of which reaches the two minute mark, and they’re pretty hard to tell apart.

Luckily, the variation in the music is more pronounced than on 18:03:20:888, which brings about a few moments that are actually a little enjoyable. Unfortunately, this album suffers from the same tonal issue as before: almost every riff sounds like an alternate take on one idea with pretty much no emotional resonance or alteration to be found. It’s as if someone handed a guitar to some tech-death wizard and told them that they could only hit five notes and come up with ten minutes of material based on that. But heck, even then, said hypothetical guitarist wouldn't use the exact same riff motif for the entire ten minutes. The best way to describe the arrangement here is to imagine a ton of low E-string palm mutes accented by a few random notes on high strings to fill in the gaps. That's about it. It’s more along the lines of someone goofing around than sitting down to write a true song, like endless improv from someone afraid to stick to anything and simultaneously afraid to leave an already idealized pattern. There’s no beginning or end to anything, no dynamics, no contrasts, no reward. Every track runs into the next without break or pause so that it’s hard to tell when the next track has started. You could start or end a song at any given point without it making a lick of difference. The few good moments are buried under technical monotony that goes nowhere fast.

Though they are far and few between, there are some good moments here, such as the little shift at 1:20 in the first track when the riffing changes tempo and actually sounds like a hook, something to remember after the album is over. Sadly, this section (if it can be called that) doesn’t even take ten seconds before that shining moment is buried under the same monotony that dominates the rest of the album. There are some clear good moments in The Cosmic Vision when I can almost start to see a pattern that has an effect on me, and the drums in their variation and style do really help the music some of the time when it seems like they’re the only ones doing something, but all things considered, it’s not enough. You can’t finish this album and then, ten minutes later, think back to any passages and get them caught in your head. There’s so little that stands out here that it makes ten minutes feel like an hour.

It’s unfortunate, too, because I can sense potential coursing under the surface of the music. Though I can’t say I like this album, I can say that Deathred is, at the very least, unique. They shape their own style of technical relentlessness that isn’t really present in other bands. I do respect the absence of a vocalist and believe that this music could be at its strongest without a singer, but as it stands I think anything to distract from the predictability would be helpful. I guess Deathred’s music can be appreciated for having a working concept as well, but I know that Alfredo San Martin can do more than this. Under the motifs that he has used in Deathred’s music, there’s still a lot more to explore. The few shining moments in the album are proof of that. This album is ultimately very lacking in versatility, despite attempts to never repeat a riff verbatim twice.

I suppose if you love music from an aspect more technical than anything else, you might find something to like in this mechanical release. Maybe it’s because I have such a strong dislike for music that holds technicality on a pedestal way above depth or structure or sentimentality, but as it stands, I cannot see much in Senses Paramount Flowing Into Darkness that is redeeming.