Alkaloid - Liquid Anatomy

This one has been a real doozy to try to get through, not the way Therion’s recent album was as doozy (three hours of soulless, masturbatory, neoclassical meandering), but because it is still such a massive and intricate piece of progressive death metal.

The German-based five-piece supergroup of sorts (featuring members formerly of the likes of Obscura, Necrophagist, and Aborted) made their first mark on progressive death metal in early 2015 with their album, The Malkuth Grimoire, a 73-minute debut opus that took an immediate shot at grandeur in a genre already filled with such ambition. It was a tightly performed, intricately composed, epic opening statement for the band, but one that, after all the dust settled, seemed like more of just a way of throwing everything about the band out there in some form to make a wave. It was still full of fantastic pieces and shining moments, but despite the band’s members all coming from well-established and respected bands associated with extreme death metal, it suffered a bit from that debut album syndrome of needing to try to grapple for attention like a hungry baby bird in a nest of a thousand young. Perhaps it was like the first few games for a massive sports team that just signed a bunch of expensive players from various other clubs, all very talented and capable, but just trying to bend their individual tendencies from their previous orientation to that of their new collective.

On Liquid Anatomy Alkaloid sound more tightly knit than they did on their debut, which is made more noticeable by way of the songs’ more focused compositions in most departments. The songs have more cohesiveness across the album than the songs on The Malkuth Grimoire did.

Yet the album still falls a bit into the same pitfall of shotgunning all sorts of musical ideas at the page in the name if prog its predecessor also did. It’s not that the album is entirely without direction, it’s just that in some instances, a song’s trajectory is altered simply to incorporate more and more novel ideas, as though a little bit of repetition of ideas is some kind of cardinal sin of progressive metal. The song “In Turmoil’s Swirling Reaches” is one example of this, with its awkward jumps from one idea to the next of various types, with a fenistrated techdeath binding haphazardly trying to stitch all the pieces together. The opening track “Kernel Panic” is another track that suffers this fate, channeling some cool jazz fusion vibes during its darting back and forth between light and heavy passages reminiscent of Cynic. It’s a semi-neat idea of a song, but not really all that strong of an opener and the loud-soft dynamics are handled a little more clumsily than progressively skillfully, which I know the band can do. The more melodically focused title track shows a bit better the band’s ability to tactfully transition in and out of calmer, acoustic passages and build a mood around that dynamic.

Where the album often finds its strength is in its members’ common ground: highly technical and still crushing death metal in the raw. The album’s second song “As Decreed by Laws Unwritten” exemplifies this greatly with the pinch-harmonic-riddled groove it opens with and the growl-heavy sections focused on building a harrowing obelisk of relentless double-bass ferocity, nasty guitar riffage, and monstrous vocals of various sorts that follow. And it’s anything but simplistic in its approach, still progressive and elaborate in its trajectory. It’s and interesting listen for all eight minutes of its length and probably my favorite moment on the album. The song “Azagthoth” that follows it makes itself compelling by much of the same approach, injecting some extreme speed and technicality into some raw, unforgiving death metal, and like the preceding track, it still traces an interesting musical journey through its structure, not simply switching the distortion on and off. “Interstellar Boredom” is another fine example of the band making their mark by building up their performance technicality from a simple, crunchy palm-muted introduction, eventually reaching a more glimmering climax of guitar virtuosity and intricate rhythms. The down-tuned “Chaos Theory and Practice” forms a similarly infectious swirl of brutal death metal elements with more flashy displays of instrumental mastery worked into the mix in a complimentary highlighting rather than shoehorned way.

The album’s big moment of course is its nearly 20-minute closer: “Rise of the Cephalopods”, a theatrically expansive mammoth of a progressive metal epic that takes its time to narrate the establishment of the resilient phylum of mollusks. While its handling of the transitions is mostly pretty well-done across its massive length, what ideas it brings to the table at this point aren’t that special to the album. I enjoyed the patient introduction and the big, sinister, blast-beat-driven section about 13 minutes into the song, but even that peters out into typical techdeath after a few minutes. It’s a song that, despite its flashes, doesn’t really do all that much with its length.

Overall, Liquid Anatomy is indeed a respectable improvement upon what strong foundations the band’s debut laid, but it’s an album that still finds the group trying desperately at many point but unable to really provide something unique from within the world of technical and progressive death metal. Where it succeeds, however, is where the band don’t try so hard to dazzle or impress with quirky, short-sighted writing choices and instead stick to a sensible focus on the larger compositional pictures of the more focused songs. And luckily, this is the majority of the tracks, even if the weighty closer does tilt the average based on length more toward the middle. I think Alkaloid can continue to improve, if they continue to build their chemistry and focus on making themselves the cream of the crop through solid compositions rather than erratic arrangement theatrics.