A 2024 vinyl repress on "black blood orb" vinyl, a cool-looking blob of black and green wax that indeed looks like some biologic matter recovered from a distant interstellar warzone. Pretty rad.

This 2014 brain-blower was the first album from Artificial Brain, who came out with photon blasters cranked to the max with a complex, dissonant, deranged death metal attack that sort of picks up from the Timeghoul / Nocturnus / Wormed school of spaced-out science-fiction fueled experimental brutality. Which I'm always down for. These guys have had a hell of a pedigree over the course of their career, with assorted members connected to Luminous Vault, Aeviterne, Dreamless Veil, Afterbirth, Reeking Aura, Biolich, and Buckshot Facelift, mentioned below in my original album review. I loved having another opportunity to listen to this album again, which further cemented my appreciation of Constellation as one of the more imaginative and crazed "tech" death metal albums of the past decade - if you're a fanatic for "weird" death metal, I still can't recommend this album enough. Here's my original write-up:

One of our favorite death metal albums from 2014, Artificial Brain's monstrous sci-fi progdeath nightmare is now available on colored vinyl from Profound Lore with printed inner sleeve.

Ever since discovering Voivod's Dimension Hatross as a kid, I've been more than a little obsessed with the union of heavy metal and science fiction imagery. What could possibly go better together? That fascination later led me to bands like Timeghoul, Nocturnus and Wormed, who all similarly ignited my imagination when I came upon their visions of time-traveling cyborg Christ assassins and nameless quantum horrors set against a backdrop of brutal, progressive death metal. With their debut album Labyrinth Constellation, the New York band Artificial Brain joins the ranks of the cosmically crushing, bringing their sweeping, proggy death metal to far-flung interstellar reaches, combining a complex, prog-infected heaviness with epic melodic flourishes and twisted, horrific imagery. Featuring some killer zomboid galactic warrior artwork from the now ubiquitous Paolo Girardi, Labyrinth blasts some seriously dizzying cosmic death metal from this new group, which features guitarist Dan Gargiulo (from technical death metallers Revocation) and Will Smith, who some of you might recognize from another weird death metal outfit called Biolich that was around for a short period in the mid-aughts. It's also worth noting that this was produced by weird-death / prog-metal icon Colin Marston, which often points towards a more unconventional and offbeat approach to death metal.

Offering a strange combination of nebulous prog-death and putrid sewer-trawling vocals, Artificial Brain definitely don't skimp on sonic brutality. Starting with the rumbling, ultra-heavy downtuned drones that start off opener "Brain Transplant", the band lurches into the contorted death metal assault that dominates the album, an onslaught of complex angular death metal spiked with bursts of unexpected major-key melody, and possessed by an ultra-guttural vocal assault that reaches some pretty outrageous depths of unintelligible throat-destruction, often bursting into insane pig-squeals or frantic, larynx-shredding screams. Those spiraling major key guitar parts are one of the unique aspects of the Brain's brutal bombast, and there's more than once that those chiming, bright guitar parts start to sound like something off of some early 90s math rock record, spidery Slint-like melodies crawling all over the low-end angular churn. Just as the music seems to spin out into a total blur of jagged discordant riffage and whirlwind blastbeats, though, the Brain will suddenly bring it back into sharp focus by shifting abruptly into one of their stunning melodic riffs, stratospheric, stirring hooks that come ripping out of the warped death assault. Keith Abrami's drumming is another highlight on Labyrinth, delivering a ferocious performance that flows fluidly from rapid-fire thrash tempos to eruptions of roiling double bass to wildly angular and off-kilter time signatures. In addition, a couple of songs feature additional vocals from Paulo Henri Paguntalan from Encenathrakh, adding to the chaotic mania of the whole thing. Unsurprisingly, you can hear a few hints of Obscura-era Gorguts in here, but that discordant skronk is sublimated within the band's churning sludgy heaviness, and they even make some cool use of eerie pipe organ-like textures on a couple songs that help to give this stuff its weird, gothic sci-fi feel, additionally peppered with stretches of otherworldly low-frequency electronic drone and ghostly glitch.

Technically, this is right up there with some of the more high-profile prog-death albums that have come out recently from Gorguts and Pestilence, one of my favorite albums among the various eccentric death metal offerings I've gotten in at Crucial Blast so far this year, for sure. Highly recommended if you're into the progressive, otherworldly death metal of bands like Demilich, Portal, Gigan, Ulcerate, Pyrrhon, Mitochondrion, Abyssal and latter-day Gorguts.