EXOCRINE – LEGEND

(DGR takes on the upcoming new album from Exocrine, out 26 January)

The idea that Exocrine are on their sixth full length release with Legend is one that is mildly eye-popping.

The French Tech Death group have done extremely well for themselves with a very specific formula – one whose sheer violence and velocity is akin to lighting a pallet of Piccolo Pete fireworks all at once and just letting it screech until the neighbors call the cops – that they’ve re-forged and refined time and time again, album after album, but which is still recognizably “them”.

Credit must be given as well to the band for the fact that even as the Tech Death arms race has gone nuclear (and beyond) they’ve always tried to be something more than just a bunch of relentless speed-merchants from the massive slab of headbanging groove which underpinned Molten Giant to their willingness to be completely insane on discs like Maelstrom and The Hybrid Suns, as and when the need arises.

Well, apparently those last two albums weren’t quite big enough to contain all of the band’s insane intensity, and so we have Legend.

You would think that, with a knack for pattern-matching and basic deduction, you might have some idea what you’re in for with Legend but, while it’s fun to point out that, yes, all of the band’s even-numbered albums have had single word titles while the odd number ones get the multi-word treatment and, yes, that they often function much like a movie or a game studio might, experimenting hard with one and then refining the results with the following, the most consistent thing about Exocrine is how they keep getting more and more adventurous.

And while, on one level at least, Legend sounds like an Exocrine album in the same way as their past few – i.e. it’s a humongous musical stew-pot into which the band have thrown whatever they damn well please (and had a lot of fun while doing so) – certain turns in songs almost seem to catch the band off guard as often as it does the listener, as while Legend is still mostly wall-to-wall brutality (displaying shades of each of its three predecessors throughout) the band have a dangerous knack for blindsiding the listener, and themselves, all the same.

Whether its the jump to a new label or the fact that they’ve stuck to a pretty consistent every two years release schedule, Legend is the first disc where it seems like Exocrine are truly pulling out all the stops and leaving absolutely nothing behind, and you’ll likely hear elements from all over their career throughout the album (and in the case of “Presage/Legend”, leading into “Life”, all of them within the first few songs).

As a result, it feels like Exocrine are finally tying all of their back-catalogue together this time around (while also breaking some of their existing patterns as well, such as not having two songs up front that feel somewhat divorced from the rest of the record) with the result that, even with a bonus song included at the end, Legend is a surprisingly cohesive sounding work, uniting all the classic Exocrine elements in a way which, ultimately, feels like the band are firmly playing to all of their proven strengths.

What this means, of course, is that there are multiple standout moments to be found throughout Legend, from the triumphant return of the jazz trumpet infusions during several songs to the crushing sections of synchronised bass and rhythm guitar parts which – such as can be found during the bulk of “Eidolon” and “The Altar of War” – which provide some of the record’s heaviest hooks, to the wild percussive punishment of drummer Théo Gendron (particularly in “Warlock” and “Dragon”, for example).

The advent of “Dust In The Naught” signifies a subtle shift in the album, as it’s at this point that Exocrine decide to move out of the realm of endless brutality and into the technical showpiece side of things, where the songs get more ‘flexible’ (for want of a better word) and you can sense the band grabbing the rigid frame of each one and bending it into whatever form – such as that of epic closer “By the Light of the Pyre” – they want.

With the addition of bonus track “Cryogenisation” – which provides an enjoyably odd combination of gloriously dumb, chugging groove and experimentally eccentric keyboard lines that’s sure to make any fans of songs like “Wall of Water” happy –  Legend punches in at about forty-three-and-half minutes, giving you the most Exocrine the band have ever given you and lifting their sound to an almost “blockbuster” level in terms of the sheer sonic size of the music.

Six albums in Exocrine have absolutely mastered the art of sounding as gigantic as possible, and by combining much of what made their last three/four albums so good into one burly monster of its own they’ve also built a fantastic gateway into their world with Legend, its mix of clever callbacks, epic lyrical concepts, and exploration of new ideas making for an exceedingly enjoyable tour through the band’s wider musical universe even if – the occasional detour into head-spinning jazz-injected segments aside – you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of where things are heading after a few rotations.