CRYPTOPSY – AN INSATIABLE VIOLENCE

(Andy Synn is here to feed your insatiable hunger for more Cryptopsy whose new album is out Friday)

It’s generally understood, by our regular readers at least, that we tend to favour covering smaller, up-and-coming, or less well-exposed bands whenever and wherever we can, largely because – at our level, at least – those are the bands who will benefit the most from our coverage.

That doesn’t mean we won’t cover bigger bands or more notorious names when the opportunity presents itself to do so… it’s just that, after a band reaches a certain level of popularity (or notoriety) it’s easy for our voice to just get lost in the storm of acclaim (or criticism) that tends to follow most releases of a certain magnitude.

Case in point – do Cryptopsy really need us to review their new album? Well, they’re currently on the cover of Decibel which suggests that a) no, they really don’t, and b) the movers and shakers in the industry might finally be coming around to the fact that the band are (still) kind of a big deal.

But just because a band doesn’t need our help doesn’t mean we don’t want to write about them, and to be quite honest I’ve been itching to put my thoughts about An Insatiable Violence down on paper (or, at least, on the internet) for you all to read for quite some time.

Now, love them or loathe them (and I know a fair few people who still haven’t forgiven them for putting out The Album Of Which We Do Not Speak) it’s hard to deny that the current line-up of Cryptopsy – the longest-running consistent line-up in the band’s history (seriously folks, Pinard and Donaldson have been handling the bass and guitar work for thirteen and twenty years now, respectively, while vocalist Matt McGachy will have officially appeared on more albums than either of his predecessors once An Insatiable Violence finally hits the streets) – is very good at… well… being Cryptopsy.

Of course, whether you like what Cryptopsy is/are these days – I’m honestly a big fan of their current brand of “Brutal/Technical Death Metal-tinged-with-‘core” myself, but I know a lot of folks would still prefer them to go back to the more twisted ugliness of the Lord Worm years – is a much bigger question, but (as I said in my review of their last album) the band themselves clearly aren’t interested in going or looking backwards (with the exception of the occasional anniversary outing for one of their classic early records) and definitely seemed to have found their, ahem, groove over the last several years.

But while one criticism of As Gomorrah Burns was that it occasionally played it a little too “safe” (I would sometimes joke with the other NCS guys that it was “an album that even the haters would love”) in an attempt to really solidify the band’s sound for a new generation of fans, the same definitely/probably/possibly can’t be said this time around, as the Quebecois quartet have taken a few swings (though not necessarily wild ones) that you might not have expected.

Don’t get me wrong, the likes of “The Nimis Adoration” and “Until There’s Nothing Left” are still more than lethal enough to leave your brains splattered over the nearby walls, with Donaldson’s rapid-fire, razor-edged riffs and Mounier’s ballistic-level blastbeats continuing to push the band to the forefront of the extreme, while their use of spiteful, serrated hooks and gargantuan, gut-wrenching grooves often recalls the best (and most brutal) bits of latter-day Cannibal Corpse (with McGachy’s even more eye-poppingly intense delivery rightfully deserving comparisons to that of the legendary George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher too).

But it’s the band’s use of… whisper it… melody which makes the biggest difference here, with second-half stand-outs “The Art of Emptiness” and “Our Great Deception” benefitting from an added layer of moody melodic menace which, the latter especially, borders on what you might call “blackened”, while the dizzying lead guitar work and decadently catchy tremolo coils of similarly killer cuts like “Dead Eyes Replete” and “Embrace the Nihility” (as well as the show-stopping solo-section of the previously mentioned album opener) are occasionally reminiscent of the best moments of The Black Dahlia Murder at their most technically talented (which, I suppose, probably counts as things coming full circle).

It’s not perfect by any means (“Fool’s Last Acclaim” seems to somehow both drag and rush by without leaving much of an impression), and is probably going to provoke a more divisive set of reactions than its predecessor (though I’m not going to pretend that As Gomorrah Burns didn’t also have at least a few moments which fought against the formula) but An Insatiable Violence continues to reaffirm the fact that the modern day incarnation of Cryptopsy are still a band very much at the top of their game… and look likely to stay there.