DIVERGENCE: “IN CYCLED AEONS”

(Here is DGR‘s review of the latest EP from New York-based Divergence, released last month.)

Following the paths charted by heavy metal’s history has long been a hobby around here, with others having taken up the travelling pack and walking stick and played musical cartographer as the genre became less one defining sound and more of a filter that conventional music was squashed through, only to have it emerge as its own ‘heavy metal’ counterpart. One of the things that is quickly revealed by such travels, though, is that heavy metal has a lot of divergences – four at least, if you trust the ole metal archives these days – and a person could easily lead a life in which many of those are ignored in favor of specializing in one or two breaks from the path.

This is how you have people who could easily name every sludge band to ever emerge from the muck of musical misery but would fail in separating a single song between bands like Sonata Arctica and Blind Guardian. It’s how you could lead a life in which you may never cross paths with a single band bearing the name of Divergence, even though there have been a few throughout the years with a concentration of them based on the East Coast.

This current Divergence then, hails from New York and plays a very technically infused style of death metal, with regional bleedover for taste when it comes to heavy, chugging riffs and a monstrous groove bordering on the overwhelming.

While New York’s more famous ‘tion’ bands or their bevy of slam-related cousins that’ve blurred the lines between deathcore and the more traditionally ugly are not the most direct influence for Divergence’s newest July release – the EP In Cycled Aeons — it’s difficult to hear the titanic riffwork crashing head on with the tech-death sphere and not starting seeing the Divergence crew as a multi-limbed monstrosity of musical absorption – including some of their local peers anyway.

The modern era has loaned itself well to groups existing outside of their particular regional influence. The internet age and the ability to assemble entire groups from across the world has created many projects in which there is a dedication to a specific ‘sound’ moreso than one that comes up in a local scene. Divergence have existed since 2011 and have three EPs to their name thus far – the most recent, In Cycled Aeons, being the one on the dissection table today. Divergence, as a result, are creatures of musical osmosis.

The EP’s tale of the tape is five songs for about twenty-two minutes of music, combining a deathcore groove with the fingerwork-dancing time signature changes and guitar fireworks of a modern tech-death band. Divergence are in a carnage-strewn and immensely crowded battleground with their third EP but in those sub-twenty-two minutes they ask of you, they are taking a mighty swing at justifying their place within tech’s realm while at the same filtering some serious influence from the current strain of death metal traveling up and down the East Coast into their own sound with serious surgical precision and sterility.

It’s a strange comparison point to start with, and many metalheads will upturn their noses when the idea of the blue light and white tile of a surgical floor is invoked, but here it is in regard to the frighteningly accurate precision with which Divergence operate on In Cycled Aeons. There’s little room for error in the tightly-controlled summonings of Divergence’s newest EP and one does not attempt to enter battle with the hardened warriors of the tech-death and -core spheres without basically being on their ‘A’ game from moment one. Anything less leaves you with the fate of the current attempt being added to the body pile and you kicked back to the starting line again.

The idea of introductory scene setting takes an aluminum bat to the skull early on within In Cycled Aeons. Divergence instead have elected to start their latest EP by launching the listener full-bore into the first song “Asylum Of Refuge”. “Asylum’s” near five-minute runtime is constructed out of multiple converging elements including the expected yet always welcome skullcrushing -core heavy rhythms layered throughout. “Asylum of Refuge” goes through a few different phases, initially bursting onto the scene with an infernally fast death metal riff that straddles the line between thrash and old-school.

This is a song that moves as quickly as its opening segment, though, because before long you’re in the oddly eerie and alien tech-death world with its bent melodic lines as they dance around a galloping rhythm that lays the groundwork for the knuckledragger of a breakdown closer to the end. That in itself leads to a surprisingly straightforward and almost melodeath-esque closing bit. As mentioned above, Divergence are constructing their sound out of a handful of intertwining threads and “Asylum Of Refuge” is a good introduction to that idea. That way, nothing will seem to fully come out of left field – even some of the more blatant transitions between segments like the one leading into the halfway transition within “To Form A Serpent”.

One element that resurfaces often throughout Divergence’s latest offering is that the band cannot resist a guitar riff over a monstrously heavy double-bass roll. They’re of the type that are meant to propel a song forward as if soaring on the wind, and every song within In Cycled Aeons is guaranteed to have one. It is a building block that becomes foundational to the Divergence sound on this EP, and so the twenty-plus minutes spent here are often punctuated by a brutally heavy drum segment propelling the song forward.

Some songs mutate more than others during these parts; for instance “The Crucible” seems to get heavier and more violent as the song continues onward, whereas some of the shorter songs instead favor one solid defining part and run with it. Divergence show that they can easily work within both spheres, the progressively heavy and ambitious side of death metal and the refined yet still profoundly dumb rhythm chug colored by a circle pit riff or two. It is a genre-blurring that has become very common within the metal world, demanding a high level of technical expertise alongside the ability to keep people moving. Thus, the times when the guitar crew of Divergence imagine themselves virtuosos – such as the opening of “On Pathless Seas” – are just as quickly annihilated as the group stack tech-death and brutal-death tropes on top of one another as if building towers to the heavens.

Divergence are brave warriors fighting a valiant battle in an incredibly crowded segment of the heavy metal world. In Cycled Aeons is a commendable and rock-solid effort with some truly surprising moments woven throughout. The hybridization of so many subsegments of the death metal genre has resulted in a fascinating if obsfuscated creature on its own. No longer do you have the sort of one- and two-dimensional descriptors available to you where you can cite eras of death metal and pin something as one particular thing. There’s bludgeoningly heavy riffwork in the five songs offered here that could reflect the the group’s locality, but they are also just as blurred as the ground from the the multi-stepped ladder upon which Divergence are climbing.

With a group like Divergence you’re discussing multiple generations of influence being tied together and then beaten into form from there. The starting point for a release like In Cycled Aeons could be just as easily approached from the deathcore side of things as from a tech-death or a brutal-death perspective. Divergence’s ear for melody and showmanship – both within the rhythm section and the spotlight stealers on the guitar front – is what helps them stand out beyond just being another issuance of heavy metal red meat.

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