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PILLORY
Evolutionary Miscarriage

Unique Leader (2014)
Rating: 8/10

Not to be confused with the Canadian thrashers of the same name, this Boston, Massachusetts-based act plays technical death metal; y’know, the sort that drains fluid from the brain, freezes the blood in the arteries, breaks the neck in one swoop and carves up the intestines with its complexity. And I bloody love it!

Evolutionary Miscarriage is Pillory’s second full-length opus, and follows on from 2005’s No Lifeguard At The Gene Pool debut which pretty much signalled the demise of this act who then split up three years later, only to return in 2014.

Pillory is the the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Darren Cesca, who has drafted in numerous sidekicks over the years in order to express those mystifying mathematics which are the result of bubbling, jarring bass-lines, crushingly yet epileptic guitar jerks and those drum contortions which sound as if they’ve been handled by an octopus. But for those of you who like your music consistently awkward and embedded in philosophy, you will no doubt get a kick out of this long-awaited experience into the ether.

Album number two offers 11 quizzical cuts that refuse to rest on any laurels, but instead one moment race with a frenzy only to pulverise with perplexing dryness and inaccessible pattern shifts. Yep, it belongs in the same algae-ridden corner of space once carved out by the likes of Pestilence, then Cynic, and onto Gorguts, Necrophagist, Origin etc., but it’s only real similarity to these heavyweights is its ability to bewilder and jolt the bones so that they crumble under the sheer force of the unpredictable twists and turns.

It’s certainly death metal, but it’s of the contemporary order as the instruments sort of exist as some type of printer for data. The drums are a series of vigorous eccentric taps, trickles and stabs performed by some demented droid who clearly uses metallic tentacles instead of drumsticks. The guitars do lack an overall weight which means that the record rarely crushes the listener, but instead acts with stealth as the solos slide cleverly and with devious manner between those knee-jerk riffs. The bass, as one would expect, is masterful and yet alien as it trundles with the effects of hot lava spilling from the cracks.

When all thrown into the blender the result makes for one hell of a brain, and one that appears as if wired to a computer and spat out via the chesty vocal rasps. In fact, my only issue is with the vocals; they rarely threaten unless they take on a more bellowing, throaty manner, but because this album refuses to sit still it continues to engross throughout.

For all of its scientific buffoonery and apparent intelligence there is still the underlying fact that this is a very good death metal record, even though at times it is a little too jazzed up for its own good. But one always has to make room within the cranium for progressive extreme metal, and so if you’re going to reserve a space for one such self-indulgent slab of technical extremity then make sure there’s enough room for Evolutionary Miscarriage and all the snippets of information contained within.

Neil Arnold

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