(Below you’ll find DGR‘s review of the newest solo release by the standout German musician Hannes Grossmann, which was released on February 9th.)
Hannes Grossmann‘s solo career has been one of the more interesting things to pop out of the many tech-death groups and scenes over the decade. You never realize just how foundational a musician is to a particular style until they’ve done five or so releases that feel like continual statements of ‘I can do this in my sleep’ quite the way like Hannes does with some of his solo stuff.
Not only that but it’s long since been proven that as a musician he’s an absolute machine, and while Gene Hoglan has long earned the nickname ‘Atomic Clock’ when it comes to drumming, Hannes is equally precise and reliable. You could hand him anything and it seems within about an hour or so he’d have a grasp on the whole setlist. There’s a certain guaranteed reliability to the guy that pretty much assures quality; any band he joins is in good hands and any recording where he sits behind the kit is probably going to be just as solid.
His solo career has afforded him affable room to explore as well, and while his first two releases felt a little like finding their footing, Apophenia and onward are adventures in their own right.
His latest EP Echoes Of Eternity – continuing the ‘echoes’ theme from earlier single ‘Echoes Of Wisdom’ – sees him looking backward at his career thus far and tackling music in the style of the many groups he’s drummed and written for – Necrophagist and Blotted Science in particular get callouts here. Intriguing then, because even among all of his solo work it’s never seemed like those styles have ever really left. You could alway hear the throughline and sense the DNA of earlier groups he’s been a part of still being a massive part of his musical style, it just seems that with Echoes Of Eternity he is attempting to make that sense the most overt it’s ever been.
Five songs and a hair over twenty-one minutes is what Echoes Of Eternity presents. Four of those are full group arrangements and one is an expectedly intricate instrumental named “Humanoid Body Automoton” wherein the aforementioned Blotted Science action takes place. Every Hannes Grossmann solo release has shown that he has a thick booklet of musicians to work with, and often they’ve been part of the grander tech-death circle over the years, seeming to cycle a collective of personalities around from release to release.
A lot of those people have come from groups he’s sat behind the kit for and they’ve slowly intertwined with one another, creating a weird nexus point among his solo albums. Even on an EP release like Echoes Of Eternity he still manages to bring along guitarists Justin Hombach, Kevin Heiderich, and Tom ‘Fountainhead’ Geldschlager for either full recordings or lead melodic work and solos that will often blast into songs like cars crashing through building entrances after the driver confuses the acceleration and brake pedals.
Thus, between himself, vocalist Stephan Schultz, and bassist Chief Mendoza rounding out the fantasy death metal draft this time, you’d be right in assuming that the twenty-one minutes of Echoes Of Eternity are in good hands. That guarantor of quality mentioned earlier is still in play here and each of the songs are both a combination of head-spinning instrument-work and blast-from-the-past in about equal measure. The influences of past work are far more purposeful here, so instead of them just being hallmarks of a musician’s writing style that seem to follow from release to release, they play out more like fun challenges, just to see if they still can.
“Engraved In Their Shrouds” still has that slow groove and crushing heaviness that always seems to pop up in one of the releases he’s drumming on, whether it be Alkaloid‘s dive into the deep end of Morbid Angel atmospherics on Liquid Anatomy, Obscura going low and slow on “Ocean Gateways”, or even Necrophagist when they would randomly slam the brakes on a song midway through what would’ve otherwise been another launch into the stratosphere via sheer velocity.
Things do pick up, but the pacing of this EP works in its favor given how much spotlight “Retrospective Monolog” is likely to grab, given how much of its past and shared musical influence it wears on its sleeve. Two minutes and thirty seconds of an artist having fun seemingly yelling ‘look at what I can do!’ and watching the machine spin into high-speed controlled chaos does tend to leave an impression.
That style cycles back around again in the EP’s third song “Echoes Of Eternity”, yet given that the song is the title track, you’d understand how it does split the difference between the two. It is the EP’s longest song as it edges up near six-minutes and lays quite a bit of groundwork between “Retrospective” and “Engraved” before it. “Echoes Of Eternity” provides a lot of musical meat to bite into before it works its way into the much vaunted utterances of the phrase “Echoes of eternity”, intoned with enough seriousness to think they were otherwise summoning past spirits.
That is how the Echoes Of Eternity automaton works. Much as it is the latest expulsion from the creative mind of an absurdly precise musician, it is also a fun career deep-dive which again shows that Hannes is terrifyingly talented, so much so that when he sets out with a purpose to do something that so accurately emulates a previous work you could almost consider it a new addition to a long dormant project. Whatever the musical situation calls for, he’s right there with enough precision that you could set your watch by it. Hannes‘ wider musical universe is a testament to that, and his collective solo works have all been demonstrations of whatever strikes him at the time, once the initial entry fee of ‘this is still going to have a TNT explosion’s worth of tech-death in it’ is paid, as that has become his artistic throughline.
Whether it be the resurrecting and reworking of songs in his first two releases, the weirdly progressive, thrashier, and at times melodeath Apophenia, or the sleek and melodic world of To Where The Light Retreats, there’s been quite the body of quality music with his personal stamp attached to it. Hannes flinging himself into the extended “Echoes” idea for musical inspiration is the latest addition to that collective. The extended musical universe he’s created allows him to summon older spectres and make them work just as good as they did from the moment they were living. Yes, you’ll notice how every single gear works in this machine – especially if you have familiarity with any of the groups he’s been a part of – yet it is still extremely hard to resist the siren call of well-written music in that style when the musicians behind it seem to be having a blast raising it from the dead again.
https://hannesgrossmann.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-of-eternity
https://www.mordorsounds.com/
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