Dyssebeia‘s debut album Garden of Stillborn Idols was released last November by Transcending Obscurity Records. Like a chameleon in a hot house of flowering plants, its musical colors constantly shifted, revealing flashing shades of prog metal, melodic death metal, and black metal, richly embellished with technically impressive twists and turns by all the performers, animated by wild vocal savagery, and loaded with bursts of battering-ram groove.

With a clean yet powerful production behind it, the album incorporated swaths of beguiling melody, head-spinning fretwork fireworks (including glorious guitar soloing), frequent changes in tempo and mood, and the kind of rhythmic punch that might leave a listener checking for bruises and hairline fractures.

Fluid and elegant one moment, jarring the next, and spectacularly racing the next, it was (and still is) a thoroughly exciting roller-coaster ride of adventurous extremity, capable of rocketing to exhilarating heights and plunging to breathtaking depths, while veering around head-whipping turns with both abandon and aplomb.

It still is an album very much worth your time if you haven’t taken the full ride. As a reminder of its marvels for those who might have overlooked them, today we present a video for one of the album’s prize tracks, “Hatch“. Continue reading »