Take place to enjoy Multiversal, The Beast of Nod’s second album.
Created in 2011 in the United States, the band is composed of Paul Buckley (vocals/lore creator), Görebläster Körpse-härvest Lunden (guitar/composition), Brendan Burdick (bass) and “Lord Marco” Pitruzzella (drums, Six Feet Under, Solus ex Inferis, Mazikeen, ex-The Faceless, ex-Brain Drill…).
The band plays Death Metal with diverse aspects, it’s a fact, but its music is also influenced by an imaginary universe created by the singer, named The Land of Nod. And this intergalactic universe that melts Technical/Progressive Death Metal, Fantasy and an outstanding creativity is about to express itself again through nine songs!
If you think you will hear a basic scholar exhibition of heavy music coupled to futuristic accents, you are wrong. The Beast of Nod’s compositions cleverly melt an extreme technicality, a super heavy violence and a spatial universe that the band develops as they want together, sometimes exploring powerful parts, complex parts, that we can hear on Flight of the Quetzalcoatlus or Contemporary Calamity, the two firsts songs. The sound is worked as hell, and allows musicians to go through every shade, from pure aggression to soaring parts, but also modern violence on Intergalactic War!. Keyboards take an important place in this composition, creating a weighing universe to spread the band’s convoluted riffs, then the heady Call of the Squirrel strikes. We find on this song surrealistic leads signed by Joe Satriani to accompany the band’s fascinating complexity.
Nick Padovani (Equipoise) joins the band for Unleashing Chaos, a dark and piercing song that focuses on modern Prog sonorities coupled to pure violence, then the crushing and majestic The Plan for Multiversal Creation strikes. Epic ambiences are added to this omnipresent technicality and this creative rage, then we find John Matos (Abiotic) on Guardians of the Multiverse, a warlike song that begins with a seizing piano part. The song is also majestic but offers no rest to musicians that give the best of themselves on this song, cut by an airy break. The multiple leads finally haunt us before the virulent The Latent Threat, a song that picks into Deathcore and Symphonic Death Metal influences to strengthen this part of the band’s story, driving us to ShRedding OF the Cosmos. This song doesn’t welcome one or two, but three guests: Sanjay Kumar (Wormhole), Matias Quiroz (Bleak Flesh) and Michael Angelo Batio play with the band to give the last composition an imperial flavour, brutally melting a heavy ambience to a fast-paced virtuosity. Very jerky, the rhythmic strikes us until the last second.
Do you think The Beast of Nod is another dumbly technical project? You fools. Multiversal offers us a real orbital journey focusing on an incredible technicality to make us live the band’s very own universe, to which guests perfectly fit.
90/100
