Alongside Nuclear Tomb, Sovereign, and Dissimulator, Miscreance are a band who’ve left me asking myself for the past couple years, “Have I always been a closet tech death fan?” Their debut album, Convergence, came out of nowhere, absolutely stunning me with its subtle balance of death-thrash brutality and virtuoso musicianship. Clearly, I wasn’t alone. The folks at Season of Mist took notice, taking the Italian maestros under their wing for their sophomore offering, Reminiscence. Yes, much like ’80s Def Leppard and their “-ia” albums, it seems Miscreance has a thing for “-ence” albums. Perhaps their third platter will be titled Presence? Oh wait, Zeppelin beat ’em to it.
On Reminiscence, Miscreance takes their technical death-thrash sound further than ever before, upping the songwriting, musicianship, and production without sacrificing the savagery they’ve established on past releases. There are obvious shades of Death and Pestilence in their early ’90s technical days, yet without a single riff, solo, or hook sounding directly lifted from either band. If anything, much like Convergence before it, if you told me this album dropped in 1992, I’d believe it, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.
The opening “Trait d’Union” establishes this formula early on, barraging us with sprawling riffs, mathematical drumming, and even occasional passages of clean vocals in the vein of Cynic. The thrashing side of their death-thrash sound draws from prog-thrash titans like Voivod and Watchtower: Strange and unsettling, yet still mosh-worthy. The death side, again, harkens back to tech death in its infancy. Songs like “Vision”, “Scalp Ceremony”, and “Zenith of a Dying Sun” really nail this frantic Spiritual Healing-esque approach to tech death, with the album growing more chaotic as it progresses.
Lengthier cuts like “Synaptic Cortex Dissection” and “Symbiosis” showcase Miscreance’s prog side with all its rampant twists and turns. Though I’m not sure I can ever see them going full Voivod mode (Nuclear Tomb, on the other hand…), if they were to do so, I’d point to songs of this nature as foreshadowing. And while it is such a minute detail in the grand scheme of things, one trope that really adds flavor to this outing is the incorporation of world music beats and textures. Granted, they largely function as segues (i.e. “Oracle’s Rift), but they make their presence known enough to impact the direction of the album as a whole, helping to further carve Miscreance’s own niche within the death metal landscape.
Though this album owes nothing sonically to any metal forged past the year of 1993, Reminiscence comes off as even more of a “crossover” album than its predecessor, bridging the gap between the OGs of tech-death and the new schoolers who hyper-fixate on BPMs and how many notes can fit within any given measure. And while I personally lean towards the bands mentioned in the first sentence of this review, I have no doubt that Miscreance will continue to grow on me in time (Convergence still did). I’m sure in a few years time, we’ll all be reminiscing on Reminiscence, and how it served as a stepping stone for Miscreance’s next logical metallic evolution.
7 out of 10
Label: Season of Mist
Genre: Technical Death/Thrash Metal
For fans of: Death, Pestilence, Sadus
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