vote
6.5
- Bands:
EXIST - Duration: 00:37:02
- Available from: 12/04/2024
- Label:
-
Prosthetic Records
Streaming not yet available
Four years after “Egoiista”, Exist, a band featuring Max Phelps (Cynic, Death To All, Obscura, Defeated Sanity), are back with an album that takes inspiration from the conspiracy theories that are popping up like mushrooms around the world modern, highlighting their danger but also the fascination they have on many people.
If the penultimate release of the American group was something mammoth, this new “Hijacking The Zeitgeist” certainly sounds more concise and direct, starting from the duration – just over half of its predecessor. Although the pieces are shorter, however, the richness of solutions adopted is not lacking: as always, Exist’s music lives on the contrast between death metal outbursts and progressive digressions, but this time the former are less vehement while, on the contrary, it is the use of the clean voice is more frequent.
The dissonant riffs and digressions smelling of fusion and jazz inevitably refer to bands such as Cynic and Obscura, you can feel King Crimson’s passion for prog and sometimes you move into territories that are not far from the latest Ihsahn (“Funeral Toll ”). As often happens in music of this type, the bass has a space of its own and the drums are the absolute protagonist in the boldest rhythm variations. The arrangements are always refined and also unpredictable, the technique is refined without exceeding virtuosity as an end in itself, and the only obvious flaw seems to be the voice of Phelps himself, not always at ease, especially when he is in growling.
The most successful songs are those in which we get close to the aforementioned Cynic, as in “Thief Of Joy”, or in any case those in which the prog component is predominant, so much so that the move towards these shores could be a path that can be successfully followed, while more linear songs, such as “A Path To Nowhere”, are obvious and do not stand out for their quality.
Maybe not the evolution we would have expected, and the transition is probably not over yet: for now an unfriendly album, with good peaks and some slips, we’ll see what the next step will be.
