(Ob)servant - Psycroptic

This is one of the more technically proficient albums I've listened to, if you've ever heard Anata, they might be 1/3 as good as Psycroptic, which is much faster, and much more aggressive. The album opens with (Ob)servant, which is the shortest song on the album, its technical, its aggressive, its unrelenting, its dynamic. Now would be roughly an appropriate time to point out though, that the recording quality is absolutely terrible, it sounds crystal clear, usually, but once the volume peaks 40, large chunks of the vocals are rendered completely unintelligible, and may be best described as "whooshing" with deep breathing, this is NOT what this is, along with the vocals, the drums drop off to fuzzy snapping, and the bass drums universally sound very "clicky" and sharp. A Calculated Effort, Slaves of Nil, and The Shifting Equilibrium are all essentially the same song as (Ob)servant, except extended, exactly the same guitar tone, same general sounds and riffs. Removing the common bond serves as a transition song into the last block of four, which are all chords, with some occasional technical riffing. The last 5 songs do not beat Anata at anything if your curious, there are very few complex riffs here, relative to the first four songs, and by the way, these songs sound very similar too. My recommendation is to buy the songs "A Blood Stained Lineage", "Removing the Common Bond", and "A Calculated Effort" and leave it at that, the other songs offer very little new material, and serve to switch up the riffs so they aren't exactly the same, and you don't grow old AS quickly. In other words, its two broken up prog songs, take the opportunity and run far, far, away. There is nothing inherently bad about this album, and it would score around a 9.5 if Psycroptic kept things fresh, I'm docking 4.5 points for the repetitiveness.

6/10

Ob (Servant) (Bonus Dvd)