Dissimulator – Lower Form Resistance Review

[Artwork by Jesse Draxler]

Being three heavy metal fans from Montreal, Quebec, Dissimulator grew up listening to Voivod, who is the most obvious influence at play on the band’s debut album, Lower Form Resistance, and evident in every aspect of the album from that art to sound and style to song composition. Of course, they listened to lots of other great heavy metal, too, and were clearly drawn to the darker and heavier side of things, as clearly reflected in the other music they make as members of Chthe’ilist, Atramentus, and Worm, but also the very technical side in Beyond Creation, First Fragment, and Sutrah. So it doesn’t take the brains of an astrophysicist to hypothesize some complex interaction of these bands on this record and that’s nominally correct. At its core, this is dry, sharp, technical thrash intersected by a dark and brutal rhythmic battery, like machines executing their commands dispassionately within precise start-stop protocols and interlaced with bright, colorful leads and solos and synthesized flourishes. And it is also so much more.

When the Dissimulator gang found the Jesse Draxler piece they wanted for the Lower Form Resistance cover art, they surely were drawn to the uncomfortable contradiction of the biotech, its stark dystopian presentation in washed out grayscale, because it represents their debut album’s music so well; that’s what good cover art does, after all. Draxler’s portfolio includes lots of similarly disconcerting work, though, so it must have been the well-known and frequently discussed Alice Krige Concordance of Sci Fi Heavy Metal that settled it for them. It hasn’t been stated outright but it’s relatively plain to see that Alice is the subject of this particular Draxler piece, since even casual fans can see her most famous roles reflected in that visage.

The first and most obvious is Alice as the Borg Queen, initially in the 1996 cinematic masterpiece, Star Trek: First Contact, and then in multiple appearances across the ST universe since. The Borg, of course, is a wonderful representation of the cold, calculated alien-machine cybernetics that has loosely defined the sound of sci fi-themed heavy metal since the dawn of sci fi-themed heavy metal. And yet, the Borg are a hybrid of technological and biological form, and this duality is reflected in death metal vocals, the tenor of which really captures the strange paradox of residual consciousness trapped in a robot form, alien-sounding but saying human things, sometimes brash and unfeeling, sometimes desperate. This is where Alice’s Borg Queen shines through as a wonderful reminder that humanity is difficult to contain and even machines can be susceptible to all those bothersome feelings. In her first encounter with the Federation, it turned out the Borg Queen wanted nothing more than company; it’s lonely out in space. That fundamentally human experience can be felt in waves across Lower Form Resistance in guitar solos that echo the aching, yearning leads of Daniel Mongrain, and the occasional clean vocal passage, as well as synthesized flourishes and vocoder strains, clear references to Cynic.

The second manifestation of the thoroughly researched and widely acknowledged Alice Krige phenomenon in Lower Form Resistance is far less obvious and maybe more important to its vitality. A decade earlier in the skid row hero’s journey, Barfly, Alice played Tully Sorenson, the naive intellectual publisher enamored with the raw honesty of Henry Chinaksi’s words. Tully was determined to rescue him, to mold, shape, and refine him for display in the cage with the golden bars, but most of all she wanted to fuuuuuuuuuck him. And in this way she conveys the hedonistic, most relatably human side of the hybrid equation, expressed here in the apparently accidental way that a lively and spirited borderline whimsy sometimes seeps through, like an unbidden giddiness in an adrenaline fog of bloodlust, machines beginning to feel their programming, cyborg voices that can’t quite shake their human tones, and the tendency of those evocative solos to bend toward vivacity, like they’re primed to finally jump the circuit from Machine to Man.

Ultimately, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Dissimulator was able to find such energy and inspiration in the unequivocally confirmed and universally endorsed Alice Krige Concordance of Sci Fi Heavy Metal, as so many others have before them, but they truly excel in their fine balance of all its aspects. Lower Form Resistance certainly hits on those layered, frightening dystopian vibes with complex time and jagged structure alongside smooth, shining circuitry, especially when they stretch things out a little. But Dissimulator also innervates the feeling that makes the cybernetic context such an intriguing paradox, the loneliness and the emptiness and the longing, and often even bordering on fun, all of it written and executed in such a cohesive way that it functions at maximum efficiency.