As the doldrums of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown were settling in, many of us sought emotional and mental escapes. My escape was diving headfirst into music (ok, and booze). One of those musical escapes took me to the far reaches of the universe with a complex narrative that included the classic science fiction tropes of astral projection, celestial entities and the end of space-time. That escape was the album Visitations from Enceladus (2020) by Cryptic Shift. For the first time since then, the British prog/tech death thrashers have embarked on a new celestial voyage with Overspace & Supertime, which is “set in parallel” with the story from Visitations from Enceladus, following the quest of a new character called The Recaller through “asteroid-ridden space battles, cryogenic freezing chambers, [and] bizarre environments of hyperspace.”
As with Visitations from Enceladus, the intricacy with which Cryptic Shift approach their album’s lyrical concepts is reflected in the the music on Overspace & Supertime. The band's labyrinthine cosmic journeys still invoke Voivod’s angular sense of melody and oddball chord progressions, Atheist’s jazz flirtations and Gorguts’ hefty dissonance, but Overspace & Supertime finds them experimenting more than ever before, by delving into heady psychedelic territory throughout the album. The opening of “Stratocumulus Everaol” is far more surreal and abstract than the vast majority of death metal you’ll hear—both past and present. It begins with guitarists Xander Bradley and Joss Farrington playing off-kilter chord arpeggiations coupled with Allen Holdsworth-like experimentation. Meanwhile, an ominous cloud of distortion, which seems to mimic the sound of a rocket launch, continuously pans from left to right. The first quarter of the song continues this loosely structured approach before coalescing into a more structured section that more closely embodies this style of extreme metal. “Hexagonal Eyes (Diverity Trepaphymphasyzm)” is similarly exotic for the genre, beginning with a rapid tremolo effect before giving way to unearthly ambience that sounds as if the guitars are playing through a reverse delay. Arguably, closing track “Overspace & Supertime” contains the album's most otherworldly writing with warbly, nearly sitar-like sounds dominating its midsection. Much of the experimentation found throughout the album is unlike nearly anything else in metal today, much less thrash and death metal.
Despite the welcome experimentation, Overspace & Supertime's tracks suffer from a common issue with extended extreme metal compositions: sacrificing cohesion for complexity. I will admit that I am generally biased against long-form thrash, death, or black metal for this very reason. Whereas other long-form styles of music that are less reliant on technical exhibition allow the music to breathe and unfold gradually, that approach is difficult to manage with thrash or death metal. It works for post-metal or doom metal because of the aural space those subgenres inherently afford their compositions. On the other hand, thrash and death metal often rely upon compositional density and tempo intensity—neither of which necessarily lends itself to longer, fluid songs.
There isn’t always a lot holding the individual songs together, especially as it concerns the 20-minute title-track and half-hour-long “Stratocumulus Everaol”. The majestic passage that starts around 16:00 in the latter, for example, contains a lot of melodic information and would have made for a solid motif for the band to return to throughout the song, but it is only performed during that particular part of the track. It often seems as if Cryptic Shift would have been better off writing several individual songs rather than two 20-minute+ epics. Granted, both of those tracks have several subtitles each, noting specific shifts in the composition. But if there aren’t smooth transitions holding them together outside of the lyrical narrative, it seems they would have been better conceived as seperate songs. At nearly 10-minutes long, “Hyperspace Topography” is the second-shortest track on the album and my personal favorite. Although it takes a couple of sudden tangential turns, it sounds most similar to the shorter tracks on Visitations of Enceladus, both musically and structurally, with slightly less complicated sections and more fluid transitions from one segment to the next.
Overspace & Supertime remains a stunning display of musicianship and experimentation, in a style of music that has much of the former and little of the latter. However, rather than upping the ante with longer and more complex compositions, Cryptic Shift may have been better off focusing on more succinct and fluid songwriting. Nonetheless, the band’s psychedelic explorations couple tremendously well with the music’s celestial focus and set a high bar for bands exploring similar spaces.