There's nothing more precious than the mix of the blistering instrumental prowess of technical death metal and the boundary-testing attitude of progressive metal, in my eyes. When these two styles collide, my adrenaline level elevates, my pupils dilate and I tend to hypersalivate. New Haven's Xenosis is the newest band to trigger this trio of bodily reactions, and their newest record, Hermetic Transmutation, may be their most triggering release yet. Here, multiple genres outside the band's norm assist the technical and progressive sounds already mastered, brutal death metal and dissonant death being the most prevalent.
What initially worried me about the additions of even more outside genres was the possibility of claustrophobia. Xenosis already produce extremely busy music, so forcing even more quirks and influences into quite convoluted tracks sounded risky. You're immediately hit with one of these styles, but not in the way you'd imagine. "Sentient Shapes," the opening track, features extremely dissonant vocals practically buried under the instrumentation. Sal Bova's barking vocals are extremely hard to hear, and while this may be a fault of my shitty AirPods that I'm forced to use until my regular headphones arrive, it's a turnoff nevertheless. This ailment rarely remedies itself throughout the record, but after listening for long enough, you'll get used to it. As the album progresses, the songs feature more prominent singing, and his vocal capabilities are displayed through pig squeals, horse neighs (??), and more "human" screams.
The rest of the band are also extremely virtuosic, especially when they can maintain such insane speeds for prolonged runtimes. Dual guitarists, Ken Bullard and Kieth Benway are top-notch, and they play like they know it. Their riffs vary from neoclassical wizardry to angular chugging, and Travers follows suit with his bass, which, in the more brutal tracks, gets its classic time to shine. Gary Marotta's drums are key players, too. Hermetic Transmutation is a dense, chaotic record that, while suffering from production, will satisfy most any tech-head.
I'm choosing to give Xenosis the benefit of the doubt with the mixing and move onward towards the most important part of any technical death metal album: the songs themselves. They're all quite spacey, similar to the cosmic horror-themed cover. This atmosphere is built in many ways, most obviously in the halfway marker, "Engravings for Dsylexic Clairvoyants". The track is a one-minute interval that acts as a bridge between two seven-minute bouts of technical chaos and a tool to expand upon the album's ambience. The two long songs, "Spore Whore" and "Rapid Metamorphosis," are the highlights of the record, due to their utter sonic variety. In the former, brutal death metal gurgles and heavy, repetitive slams are featured. The latter contains not one, not two, but three jazzy interludes filled with frenetic drumming and piano, while the closing track provides a more digestible sample of these combined traits, proving Xenosis are heading in a positive, experimental direction.