In an effort to spare the impatientest of you fine people, let’s proclaim right at the start that Reminiscence, the second album from Italy’s Miscreance, is a frankly incredible album of technical death/thrash that should speak just as legibly to fans of the foundational work done by Atheist, Death, Cynic, and Pestilence as it should to fans of newer heirs to that lineage such as Species, Droid, Dissimulator, and Anachronism. If that description sounds like you, then by the gods kindly get your ears in front of Reminiscence as quickly as your withering carcass can muster.
For the rest of us…
I – Profound/Profane
I don’t know about you, but my brain sometimes just gets stuck on something in language, like a word that feels connected to something else or an origin that suggests a deeper meaning. Lately, while cramming this new Miscreance album into my noggin, it’s set me to wondering whether there’s any etymological similarity between the words “profound” and “profane.” Turns out the answer is… nah, basically not.
The English ‘profound’ traces back to the Latin words ‘pro’ (meaning “towards”) and ‘fundus’ (meaning “root” or “bottom”). So, something is profound when it probes towards the deepest foundation or truth of the matter. The English ‘profane’, though still tracing to Latin and using the same ‘pro’ prefix, is a different story, with ‘pro’ in this case meaning “out from” or “outside of,” paired with ‘fanum’ (meaning “temple” or “sacred ground”). In this way, something profane is that which occurs outside of or beyond the boundaries of sacredness. (That notorious barrel of laughs, the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben, has an entire lecture series-turned-book on this topic, called Profanations.)
II – The Ad Strawmanem Argument
Ugh, don’t you hate it when this kind of dilatory asshole introduces a fake linguistic binary simply for the sake of later connecting it to his risible impressions of a heavy metal album made by people who, if we’re simply playing the numbers, couldn’t give more than two shits of a care about a postmodern interpretation of their loud, fast, angry heavy metal? What an utter squirt.
III – An Atheist for All Seasons
When I was first diving into the world of death metal, I generally followed the principle of “the fancier, the better.” So, when I encountered Florida death metal legends Atheist, their third album Elements seemed patently the greatest of the three extant at the time. I loved the slickness of it, its interludes, its clearly-sketched complexity, and the seemingly Captain Planet-inspired conceptual framework of the various natural elements.
Listen, we had fewer options for entertainment.
Over time, though, my tastes changed such that I was certain for years and years that Unquestionable Presence was Atheist’s masterpiece. It was clearly the perfect midpoint between the proggier smoothness of Elements and the scrappy, feral Piece of Time. How could LITERALLY ANYONE DISAGREE? But then, friends, I tell you what: just in this last year or two, some primal reset-lever in my brain must have finally clunked into place, because I am now fully convinced that 1990’s Piece of Time is THEEEEEE Atheist album, full-stop. (Jupiter, by the way: pretty good, I think! If we’re being honest, though, the particular way in which my grey matter is unwell means that I’d rather group things in threes than in fours.)
Why not imagine my sequential experience relative to these Atheist albums as knock-off tarot cards? (Given that there are an actual billion reasons why not, it’s a rhetorical question, chucklehead.)
IV – Get To The Point Or Get In The Sea
If you’re still here, thanks for bearing with us. Sometimes I need to sweep off the front porch before I can let myself into the house. The point I’m really trying to get at is that while Miscreance is hardly a carbon copy of Atheist, there’s enough similarity in the DNA that they seem like direct spiritual successors. A huge part of that connection here on album number two, by the way, is due to the incredible bass guitar work from Jean Claude Rossignol (the only member of Miscreance to change over since the band’s debut LP, Convergence). His active, fluid, intensely physical bass work recalls that of Atheist’s tragically-departed cornerstone, Roger Patterson (who was heard only on Atheist’s Piece of Time).
Despite that the membership is otherwise unchanged and the general stylistic template remains the same, Reminiscence is nevertheless a significant step up from the already-good Convergence. The tempos run a little higher, the aggression has been dialed up, the rhythmic interplay whiplashes a bit more wildly, and the band as a whole just feels a little lighter on their feet. Witness, for example, the album’s second track, “Vision.” It kicks the door straight in with a stout, punky thrash attack, but before long Rossignol and drummer Andrea Feltrin dance opposite each other for a transitional death metal breakbeat before the whole band sprints off in a third direction with a seemingly straight-ahead death/thrash pummeling. All of that, by the way, is just in the first minute or so of the song. Feltrin also pulls an admirable double shift here on drums and vocals, with his appealingly hoarse approach something like a midpoint between Martin van Drunen and John Tardy.
A foolish author posing with a non-foolish album
Across the smartly-concise 37 minutes of Reminiscence, Miscreance displays a gleeful mixture of seeming impatience and compelling, thoughtful songwriting. It’s as if they spend all their time in the practice space getting jazzed on fireworks – like “Oh shit, check out THIS lick” and “Yeah, man! And how ‘bout this tricky rhythm change-up in the main riff!” – but then back home, they sharpen their pencils and get down to the less-glamorous work of architecture. This means that there’s an interesting tension at play in the music, like a kid whose mind is torn halfway between wanting to finish the puzzle they’ve been painstakingly assembling and wanting to rip all the heads off their action figures and then Frankenstein them back together.
“The Moaning Hill,” for example, opens with a jumping, spidery riff, but the band only rides it a few times before diving straight into a tom-heavy breakdown replete with backing didgeridoo (from featured guest musician Leo de Angilla, who shows up across the album on additional percussion, flute, and the single-stringed Afro-Brazilian instrument, the berimbau). Similarly, the first thirty seconds or so of the album opener, “Trait d’Union,” are a coolly funky section of bass, clean guitar, and bongos and other backing percussion that appear to have little connection to the song that follows. Then, in the final minute of the song, the band drops into a deeply emotive section (with beautifully interlocking guitars from Andrea Granauro and Tomasso Cappelletti) with some engaging clean vocals that give it a flavor of Gojira by way of Cynic. Rather than prove distracting or indicate a band that can’t decide what they want to do, these extra flourishes have the effect of showing off a band that’s deeply engaged in the process of finding all the coolest shit they can think of. When’s the last time you did that at your job?
V – It’s A More Pleasing Numeral Than IV
The outcome of this creative impatience is – you guessed it – both profane and profound. Reminiscence feels, on one level, like it’s really chasing something – as if there’s something out there, down there, some truth or emotional weight that might be at the core of everything, if only we could reach it. At the same time – and despite how much it speaks directly to my soul as a recent convert to the church of “fucking HELL Atheist’s Piece of Time is outrageously great” – Miscreance doesn’t feel particularly tethered here to any given orthodoxy. At times their enthusiasm almost threatens to outrun their abilities, but the key word there is “almost.” If the sacred ground of technical death/prog thrash/whatever sometimes seems to require a dour, shriveled-up obsession with clockwork precision, I’m fully in favor of folks like these Italian misbehavers who want to rip up the rulebook and burn it down to the one true criterion: If it slays, it plays.
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