ENCOUNTER TRUTH: “PANSPERMIA”

(Encounter Truth hail from Bogotá, Colombia, and what follows is DGR‘s enthusiastic review of their debut EP Panspermia.)

Truth be told: Colombia’s Encounter Truth and their new EP Panspermia – released at the tail end of March – are kind of at a perfect cross-section of where yours truly has been positioned musically at the moment. At a little over twenty-six minutes in length, five songs, full of tech-death noodling that could challenge a ramen shop in terms of production and plenty of blue/purple colorization about science fiction topics, Encounter Truth have laid their entire formula out on the table before you even hit play.

Across those five songs Encounter Truth are showing that they’re likely never going to let off the accelerator once, and the constant hammering is going to come from all ends – whether it be a surprisingly prominent bass guitar or a never-ending drum section wherein the double-bass rolling is the foundation upon which many of the songs are built.

If this is the “proof-of-concept” release for the current incarnation of Encounter Truth, then perhaps this is a band to keep an eye on in the future, because Panspermia makes it clear that they have the fundamental nature of the genre locked down by the time they’re rocketing well into the EPs second song “La Alianza”.

Of course, and what will likely become much of a running theme here, stumbling upon Encounter Truth wasn’t due to any particular reaching out or publicity work. The artwork caught my eye while falling down the million different musical rabbit holes that are available when there’s a little bit of a musical lull in the release schedule. All it took was a glance at it to know “at the very least these guys are going to be well ensconced in the death metal genre”.

Further investigating the song “Negación Inherente” would prove that correct, as there’s zero pretense in the opening moments. No epic build-up, no grand orchestration to set the mood for the eventual world devastation to follow, there’s just a brief quiet and then Encounter Truth launch right into it and they launch fast. Even though we’re prone to overuse – and a lot of it is my fault – of the word “barreling” when it comes to music, it’s hard not to imagine these guys just barreling toward whatever final conflagration the final song will bring when “Negación Inherente” spends the better part of five minutes flinging itself around with reckless abandon.

We would be remiss not to dive into the titular “Panspermia” song though, given its central placement within the EP, the honor of sharing the title of the whole affair, and the fact that it’s the second longest song within the lineup – though “Horda Fúnebre” and the mean groove of “La Alianza” both clocking in at about four minutes and forty seconds is fun from a statistics point of view. Interestingly, it is also one of their first songs released, as prior to the Panspermia EP the band had been part of a split, contributing two songs.

The previously mentioned intro track and this here title song. “Panspermia”, are among of the more brutality-oriented songs of the five within the EP, calling to mind some of Profanity‘s more suffocating moments in its opening segments, especially as the bass guitar almost becomes the lead guitar as it goes wandering up and down the entirety of the song.

Then suddenly “Panspermia” becomes one of the more melodic and epic songs within the EP as well, as what constitutes the chorus within the wall of drums that are crashing over you takes on a gigantic and melodic lead guitar riff with the band intertwining themselves around it. It gives the song a massive sense of being propelled forward, so when Encounter Truth start to loop back around to it before spilling over into an odd-angled solo section, you start to understand why Encounter Truth decided to wrap the whole EP around this song. Especially since you get the impression they’ve been hammering away at it for so long that the blade of the track has been honed to a fine enough point that it could slice buildings in half.

There’s always going to be room around these parts for sci-fi tech-death, even as we make our dalliances into and out of the odd musical corners of the heavy metal world. There’s no home base quite like the mothership in orbit, so when you show up with a wall of blastbeats and the promise of songs moving at high-speed, at the very least there’s a certain amount of comfort zone to be found. Encounter Truth are one of those groups that have been able to translate the tech-death master blueprint into something that propels them well into that ever-swirling maelstrom of sound.

The pathways that Encounter Truth choose to follow and where they decide to take that sound in the future, as well as what they do to break themselves out of the fray to grab their bit of spotlight, will be worth having a few markers on them so that it immediately lands on the radar.

https://encountertruth.bandcamp.com/album/panspermia
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100040299831066