Throughout the years, people have debated what constitutes authenticity in metal, raising the question in turn of what the essence of metal should really be. Is it meant to be spiritual? Sexy? Sickening? All these strains have their place of course, but I’ve always been drawn to the genre at its filthiest and most insular, where you can sense that the creator made it as an outlet for their most bizarre (and potentially off-putting) fascinations. It’s not like metal is something you can casually put on at a dinner party; unless you’re celebrating it with fellow obsessives in the pit, this is music you’re likely confining to your car speakers or your headphones—somewhere isolating where you can confront whatever demons you need to purge, head-on.
Andrea Bruzzone seems to thrive on this approach as well. The Italian metal extremist has been going down a rabbit hole of his own with a series of highly technical I, Voidhanger releases marked by extraterrestrial synth work and winding, stop-on-a-dime riffs. Where his previous albums slowly expanded Bekor Qilish from just Bruzzone to a full band (incorporating spacier ambient and prog passages between scattershot blasts of dissonant, jazzy black metal), his latest largely dispenses with the droney divergences and scales things back down to just Bruzzone. It sounds all the more maddening and ecstatic for it. Operating with laser focus, these tracks are his most brain-battering yet, following his peculiar style to a delirious deep end.
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The mix of subgenres could fill an almanac: Cybergrind drums scrape shoulders with Cynic-y prog-metal keys, while the black-math of Liturgy mingles with licks that sting with a djent-ish tang. There’s traces of Necrophagist’s digital tech-death tightened with Origin-fast blastbeats, and it all comes fueled with the cannonball-launch moments of classic thrash. Bruzzone’s vocals seesaw between throat-buzzing alien croaks and clean vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Mars Volta ballad. Though he brought on an actual drummer for his last Bekor Qilish record, here Bruzzone is back to programmed drums, and it suits these tracks well, lending just the right amount of uncannily clean precision for Bruzzone to go haywire over.
If this sounds overwhelming, it is—but more importantly, it’s really fun. Bruzzone’s sense of dynamics and pacing is remarkable, supercharging his songs with zigzagging melodies that wind up to neck-snapping releases. The first track is all over the place: Bruzzone’s opening charge launches into a jazzily atonal synth solo before unleashing a thrashing breakdown, which gives way to a guitar appearance from Krallice’s Mick Barr, which feeds into a shockingly well-executed clean vocal bridge, all of which culminates in another breakdown even nastier than the first one. There’s hardly a moment to get bored of any of Bruzzone’s ideas before he’s onto the next one. “Fatal Remedy of the Unyielding Plague” flies between lightspeed Meshuggah-like chugs that quickly get sucked into a cycling riff vortex which seems to have no beginning or end. Even when Bruzzone is repeating melodies, as with one snaking riff that appears toward the end of the first song and mutates into various incarnations throughout the album (slowing down, speeding up, and contorting alongside its surroundings), it manages to feel fresh each time.
