Originally written by Chris Redar
The potential for never-ending boredom is so strong within A Never-Ending Cycle of Atonement, the latest from Inanimate Existence, that the temptation to skip it altogether weighed heavily on the ol’ noggin for quite a few days. They’re from California (ick), signed to Unique Leader (which, in and of itself isn’t a death sentence, but let’s just say “Unique” might be a tinged with a bit of irony), and the band features former members of Rings of Saturn (zzz…) and Vaginal Discharge (ick, again).
On a whim, I loaded this up and gave it a whirl. For those of you that don’t know this, we critic types tend to skip a fair amount of new music. It’s absolutely insane to think of listening to twenty-five or more releases a week and giving any single one a fair shake in digi-print, don’tcha know. Skipping this, in hindsight, would have been quite a mistake.
Inanimate Existence plays tech-death, and relatively by-the-numbers teath (that’s my new amalgamation of ‘tech’ and ‘death’) at that. What makes it stand apart, and thus rip, is a rhythm section head and shoulders above most of what the genre has to offer. Almost every single blast on the album is traditional, a nice change of pace from the double-hammer style we’ve been inundated with over the past three-quarters of a decade or so. And this bassist- Scott Bradley, if ya nasty- can lay a lick down that rumbles like a low-e should, but carries a sliding fluidity that puts it right in line with the lead. It’s super interesting, and it’s like that for the duration.
Another thing A Never-Ending Cycle of Atonement gets right is flourishes. There are keys present, such as in slow burner “Staring Through Fire” (pun intended), but not in a standout manner. Every once in a while, little extras pop up and enhance a tune to make it more majestic than more straightforward fare such as Obscura or Illogicist, but not goofy or over-the-top like Fleshgod Apocalypse or (ugh) The Monolith Deathcult. There are a couple of spots featuring some quite ethereal female vocals (“The Rune of Destruction” and “Out Of Body Experience”) and even a bongo or two (“Bioluminescent Photophores”) that act as a dash of nutmeg on an already nicely brewed cup of dark, as opposed to pouring an entire cup of sugar into a caramel macchiatto.
A potential turnoff here is length. Bookended by an intro/outro, the six songs in the middle tend to be in the six minute range. Now, in their defense, each track takes as much time as it needs to in developing and concluding, but that’s still a lot of time to ask of today’s busy music-listener-toer. In the Commute Exam™, A Never-Ending Cycle of Atonement stayed true to its name and never ended once on my way to work, not even in mild-to-moderate traffic. I had to finish the album at home like it was the fucking dark ages. It’s kind of long, is what I’m getting at.
Despite that little quibble, Inanimate Existence may very well take the crown as the one teath album worth listening to in a calendar year. It’s tighter than my old man’s wallet when it came to glasses that didn’t make me look like a sexual predator in high school and interesting enough to stand away from a field already crowded beyond breathing capacity. High expectations are welcome, but patience will be a virtue when diving in.
