(DGR reviews the new album from Cognizance, out 26 January on Willowtip Records)

It wasn’t too long ago we were joking about how Cognizance were one of the better bands when it comes to the “riff-avalanche” style of album – the type of disc that generally picks one particular tempo and sticks to it, leaving the band room to just rattle off part-after-part-after-part atop the listener until, by the end of it, they’ve basically been buried underneath a pile of stuff.

It’s a difficult balance to strike because you can easily get lost in your own creativity and create big, overwhelming works that, by their very nature, are hard to maintain any interest in since everything is so ephemeral and fleeting.

And while Cognizance have remained a sleek and ultra-precise machine for over a decade since the release of their first full length – after having subsisted on a series of singles and EPs – they’ve also slowly hammered and forged their sound into something as fiercely creative and memorably groove-ridden as it is terrifyingly technically-proficient.

Their previous album, Upheaval, picked up where Malignant Dominion left off, and I’ll give you three guesses as to where Phantazein picks up as a starting point a little under two and a half years later.

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(In late September Prosthetic Records released the second album by the UK band Cognizance, and better late than never we hope, DGR gives it the following very enthusiastic review.)

Upheaval, the newest album by tech-death group Cognizance, looks pretty standard if you go by tale-of-the-tape measurements for a disc, at ten songs and a little over thirty-three minutes. But one of the things that stands out with Upheaval – once you get past the eye-popping artwork – is that this is an album that fucking moves.

It may sound like a joke at first, but Cognizance waste absolutely no time with this one. The band find their groove early and stick to it for a half hour, and often you don’t even notice the time going by until the opening drum hit of “Hymns” reminds you that you’re back at song one.

Cognizance are brutally efficient with their time on Upheaval and it quickly lands the band in the ‘rolling landslide of riffs’ category of albums. You throw the thing on, it just bowls you over, and then the process starts anew. Which can sound wild at first, because it gives the impression that Upheaval kind of blasts by you without a second thought, but then you start breaking it down into individual songs and you realize that because the bar is set so high, so early on, that what is happening here is that Cognizance became ruthless in making hammering tech-death tracks in the interim. Continue reading »