(Andy Synn turns his attention today to the recently-released new album from New Jersey’s Replicant)
There’s a hoary old cliche – perhaps you’ve heard it – that “good artists borrow, great artists steal”.
And Replicant‘s new album is a prime example of this.
On paper, at least, Replicant‘s formula is relatively simple, marrying as it does the writhing riff-craft of early Decapitated with the avant-garde angularity of Gorguts and the thuggish brutality of Suffocation.
But whereas, with a bit of skill and attention to detail, it should be relatively easy for most bands with even a modicum of talent to create something good out of such high-quality ingredients (the new Atræ Bilis, for example, makes a damn good go of it too), to make something truly great demands something more.
What it requires – and what Replicant have managed to do here – is to combine all these influences and inspirations together… and then take the next step with them, not just combining but creating something that feels somehow more than the mere sum of its parts.
You’ll likely notice this almost immediately during scalding opener “Acid Mirror”, whose combination of sinuous, serrated riffage, punishing technical precision, and gut-churning, off-kilter anti-grooves no doubt contains a significant amount of DNA from seminal albums like The Negation, Obscura, and Breeding the Spawn.
But while other bands might have been content to simply Frankenstein bits and pieces of their predecessors into an exquisite, but not particularly original, corpse, Replicant have clearly spent the last several years actively interbreeding their influences to create a new, hybrid organism that represents the next stage of their evolution.
The same also applies to each of the individual performances which coalesce to form each individual track, with the discordant chug and chatter of the guitars and the frantic surge and clatter of the drums on songs such as the overpowering “Orgasm of Bereavement” and the calculatingly chaotic “Pain Enduring” pushing the band’s sound to a new level of maddening intensity and murderous ferocity, while the tensile bass twang and delirium-inducing dissonance woven throughout the likes of “Shrine to the Incomprehensible” and “Reciprocal Abandonment” continue to demonstrate the newfound dynamic depth of the band’s ever-evolving sound.
And this is what it means to steal, rather than borrow, as an artist – to take something and take complete ownership of it, and make it your own – which is perhaps most apparent during the album’s ambitious, nine-minute closer, which integrates everything that has gone before it into an absolutely monstrous chimera that feels somehow both more colossal and more concise than you might have expected.
That’s the thing about Infinite Mortality though – no matter what expectations you might have of it, it’s always ready to challenge them, to surprise you in ways both subtle and striking, giving you not necessarily what you want (nor always what you expect) but providing you with exactly what you need to simultaneously stimulate your higher brain functions while also provoking your autonomic nervous system to trigger an instinctive, involuntary response from your neck-muscles at the same time.
Which, I suppose, is just a fancy way of saying that this is one album that’s as much a head-banger as it is a mind-bender… and one of the best releases of the year so far.