Animosity by association I never looked down on allegedly "wanky" music, as my dad played guitar virtuosos such as Yngwie Malmsteen or Steve Vai in his car when I was young. That wasn't all he played, but shredders were a consistent part of my dad's catalogue, and so that sound was normal to me. It wasn't until later that I learned this type of music was (and still is) considered uncool. The musicians and their fans are even accused of being inauthentic, as if one needs an ulterior motive to make and/or (pretend to?) enjoy it. Of course, any remotely non-mainstream taste can be met with suspicion, but there's something about the ease of engaging with clean production, guitar spectacle and lack of any off-key notes or chords (which would give the impression of skillessness to a myopic listener) that lays virtuoso guitar music bare for judgment, fully transparent. "Non-technical" death metal can still be difficult to play, but if it obscures itself b...

Yes, Steve was a real person, except his name wasn't Steve I knew someone, let's call him Steve, who was going to write an ambitious twenty-eight-track prog metal album with twenty-two interludes, ending with five in a row. He proudly described his own project as "random", and cited Pestilence, specifically "Testimony of the Ancients", as inspiration. One phrase from our conversation that stuck with me was "You always need more animal noises." It instilled a feeling in me that Steve was less than dead serious about his creative vision. Maybe both of us had a low opinion on interludes in a metal context, with the difference that Steve parodied them while I silently dismissed. He admitted to me he just liked to document his brain farts (his own words) in sound form, and that squeezing proper music between them was an afterthought. I don't keep contact with Steve anymore, and I fear he never graced the world with his twenty-eight-track masterpiece...

The phrase "biblically accurate angel" makes NO sense! The cover art displays some sort of mechanical, vaguely reptilian thing with sharp teeth, tentacles and a strange green aura around it. In space. Point is, I can't tell what exactly I'm looking at. When I heard the pseudo-melodic sweep around 1:16 on the opener "The Aftermath", it felt majestic, awe-inspiring, even heavenly. Depending on your attitude towards modern tech death, you'd probably hype Origin as face-melting or dismiss it as robotic; I doubt you'd describe the band as having emotion, let alone call them majestic or heavenly. Realizing that disconnect and looking at the album cover, I couldn't help but make the association with "biblically accurate" angels. The ones wrapped in six wings so that their fiery bodies don't burn everything around, or the other ones made of crossed rings covered in eyeballs - those angels. However , "biblically accurate" makes no ...

That face might be goofy, but be honest, if you saw this in the night sky, you'd shit your pants. Origin really likes its space aesthetic. Paul Ryan will be the first to tell you sound doesn't spread in vacuum, so any presentation of space through music has to be figurative. One would think synths, drawn out chords, lots of reverb, and overall serenity do a very convincing outer space impression. But these are not musical qualities characteristic of death metal, especially technical death metal,  are they? The opener "Reciprocal" meets me with breakneck pace right out of the gate, with no signs of slowing down, and obscene amount barks and shrieks, from three vocalists. How easy is it to imagine I'm in space? Quite easy actually. Intensity - the amount of notes per second, amount of riffs per song and sheer relentlessness stand for the extreme conditions in space. The massive temperature disparity between parts of the listener's metaphorical spaceship illumin...