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DEFECT DESIGNER
Chitin

Transcending Obscurity (2024)
Rating: 8.5/10

And Norway does it again! After being blown away but Sovereign’s debut album Altered Realities, along come Defect Designer with their third full-length outing. This act – who were originally created in Russia during 2007 before relocating to Oslo in 2012 – seem to have slipped under the radars of many, but hopefully with this effort they’ll receive some much deserved attention.

Riddled with complex arrangements, peppered with bewildering blurs of speed and coated with a film of puzzling dissonance, it seems ideal that this album’s release coincides with the snarling Sovereign effort. From its crazy cover art courtesy of Ian Miller to its entangled depths of quizzical death metal churning, this is the sort of platter that rakes the senses and requires several listens to even scrape its kaleidoscopic surface.

I don’t know why a band like Disharmonic Orchestra came to mind, maybe it’s those perverse and unorthodox twists as ‘Uglification Spell’ is frantically stirred into a melting pot of barbed bass lines from Martin Storm-Olsen and scowling vocals from Dmitry Sukhinin (Diskord). ‘To Ziggurat’ drifts on a wistful solo while a gradual cold shower of sinister oozing begins to cascade before the transformation into a serrated riff. Fleshgod Apocalypse drummer Eugene Ryabchenko constructs a mighty monolithic wall especially on ‘Simulacrum’ with its torrential blasts and dehydrated yelps, but deep within there are a plethora of infectious grooves and strains of humour.

‘Gaudy Colors From Your Plastic Bag’ slows the pace, yet on its title alone adds further levels of peculiarity to this smorgasbord of surreal, abrasive extremity. The album is also punctuated by a strange and short interlude in the form of ‘Nu, Pogodi!’, which was the name of a classic Soviet / Russian cartoon series. So it’s a very odd brew that is served up by a band that is as comfortable at churning out jazzed up death metal as it is epileptic prog rock.

‘Story Of A Styrofoam’ is a wild fusion of what seems to be chaos and creativity; how these guys conjure such bewildering and spasmodic passages I’ll never fathom. To further prove their strangeness, Defect Designer throw ‘Shine Shine’ at us, a straight up heavy metal tune with extra abrasive scours and yet oddly fronted by Soilwork’s Björn Strid whose clean yet powerful croons seem vastly out of place. It’s my least favourite track on the album just because it’s so out of place, even amongst the grating contortions of ‘We Will Need Your Chitin’ and the cosmic chugs of ‘Insomnia’.

Jazz thrash, math grind, avant-garde death… it’s all here, a miasmic cauldron of zany and at times comical wizardry for those with tangled membranes and knotted veins.

Neil Arnold

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