(Here’s DGR’s enthusiastic review of a new EP released last month by Pennsylvania’s Dissentience.)
For being such a short month, February was a wildly creative time for heavy metal. Perhaps, for all our prognosticating and bullshit being pulled from a hat in regards to how the year was starting, it was time for the dam to finally burst and unleash upon us a musical flood of sorts. You can get a real sense for this when you glance around our site for instance and see multiple summary articles of music that has been unleashed throughout the month, and barring the minor occasion of a crossed wire or two, there’s barely any crossover whatsoever.
It seems like our attention was so divided in so many different directions that we could just as easily portray our focus as a scatter plot drawn by someone in the middle of an earthquake while they fell into a manhole. If there is a unifier or throughline to be found, it seems it lays not so much in where our easily distracted pack of Golden Shepherds we call the writing staff here are looking at this moment, but what we are looking forward to in the future. We’re probably going to need assistance from multiple deities if we hope to make it through the April/May pre-summer festival torrent in one piece.
February’s EPs fell upon us like rain, alongside a sizeable gathering of albums, and thankfully there was even enough spread between the tried-and-true trying new stuff out and new bands to be discovered that it didn’t feel like we were subsisting on bite-sized morsels. One band that happens to have made very good usage of the EP format this time around is Philadelphia’s Dissentience, who took four massive songs and combined them into an equally massive movement of music they have named after the EP’s final song “Kaiju“. Twenty-three-and-a-half-minutes later you will feel as if you have been placed under the footfall of a gargantuan monster as well.
As someone who enjoys the tech-death and thrash metal hybridization of recent years, it has been appreciated that the music has settled on an ambitious genre-boundary that many bands treat as a sort of baseline competency test that consists of them playing in the same sandbox Revocation did for many years before their recent two releases. Younger groups springing up out of the woodwork with an already near-virtuoso level of instrumental skill all firing away at a high-speed and barely under their control chaos has made for a very interesting string of releases every year.
Pennsylvania’s Dissentience are the latest to take on that challenge with their Kaiju EP with the previously mentioned four songs all ripping their way through genre boundaries for some solid circle-pit riff work and highly technical rhythm segments in between. The idea of “big” within music can often be conflated with just how densely packed a song can get or just how mammoth they can be with the atmospherics echoing across the whole soundscape, and Dissentience have done a solid job unifying their take on writing massive music for something that is piled high with ideas but remains surgically sleek when the music demands it. Kaiju is not an EP that affords much of a breather, neither by content nor by its pacing.
Having someone sneak up behind you and kick you down the side of a mountain is a familiar experience in metal; we often start up albums only to have an absolute landslide of riffs either fall on top of us or go tumbling down alongside us and Dissentience’s Kaiju feels that way. We are, from moment one, effectively ragdolling our way down the side of a mountain for all the comedic effect each bounce can hit with, and Dissentience are both cause and effect as to why.
Kaiju for all of its talk of grand ambition is still an EP with a lot of “get up and go” to it that allows for simplicity at times just because a good circle pit-riff is near-undeniable. Dissentience accompany this with a – as perverse as it is to say these days – sort of expected blazing technicality as often as possible, so that you land alongside the sort of high speed tech death and thrashier side of death metal Venn diagram that has been alluded to a few times now. It is such a fine point to dance upon, yet it is suprisiing just how many bands have mastered the art of making it their basic method of operation. If you had to center a band at some point on a map after seeing its collective influences blown to the four corners of the Earth, it seems as if the point upon which Dissentience have landed for their latest EP has become the agreed-upon section by the subconcious metal collective. It as if our spirit has declared, “This rules, if nothing else, land here”.
Dissentience are aiming far on Kaiju, with three of the songs on this newest EP clearing the five-minute mark with ease – funnily enough, the titular “Kaiju” song is the shortest one here – and of those, the range is between five-plus and seven-and-a-half minutes. Dissentience are giving themselves room to explore and for the most part they stick to that plan. The aforementioned “Kaiju” being the shortest of the four translates into it being one of the more consistently fast-moving numbers, though the main groove that the song uses during its opening two verses is gargantuan enough that you could see where the giant monster idea first started to germinate. Dissentience pull the song back into that particular stomp a handful of times, using it to flow the song into a particularly lengthy guitar solo battle and one final circle pit to close out.
Opposite ends of the EP, “Obsidian Tomb” and “Death Shroud”, are both lengthy numbers benefiting from equally lengthy introductory segments. “Obsidian Tomb” is the faster-moving of the two but has obviously been given the “attention grabber” job description, so many of its ideas are ones that echo throughout Kaiju as a whole. The multitude of parts tumbling over the top of each other in avalanche format makes for an adrenaline rush of a start – Dissentience seem to pile it on early and then slowly whittle the EP into monstrous form through the course of its run time, shifting gears across a multitude of death, progressive death, and maelstrom-spinning circle-pit riffwork.
Kaiju is built of songs large in stature, but it is interesting how four tracks can build a narrative for you as the pattern-matching part of the brain kicks in. “Death Shroud” takes its time in building up to its final incarnation, clawing back the EP from the high-tempo that “Kaiju” was clocking just before it. “Death Shroud” is a song of spasms and starts; equally heavy in its grindingly-slow tempo and then alternate death-metal blastfest for measures at a time. It precariously hangs on its balance until the last minute when it retreats back into the comfort of the hammering riff-work that started the song post-intro.
Obviously, Dissentience are stepping into a somewhat crowded playground with Kaiju, not just from an inspirational front but also in its core genre choices. Dissentience are a frenetic mass of influences turned sentient and unleashed upon their instruments. Kaiju has the energy of a mass of thoughts turned static long enough to be made cohesive – you can pick and choose your way across their obvious influences with the joy of a child running riot through a candy store – and in its current incarnation makes for a quick-moving hammer of a good time.
Dissentience execute well upon the sought-out exploratory factor of Kaiju. It’s easy to give into the temptation of trying to skate by on a jumble of riffs and overwhelm soneone from moment one, and it’s a credit to them that each of the songs here feels crafted, even when they do pile our plates high on opener “Obsidian Tomb”. When your EP’s spiritual animal is a gigantic city-crushing monster though, you’ve set a fairly high bar for yourself – trust us, there’s a few bands we could refer you to that have tackled the same inspiration in the past few years, and some have made it their whole identity – and Dissentience achieve that across the twenty-plus minutes that engage you in battle here. There’s plenty of familiarity to be found on Dissentience’s newest EP but the four songs here are a solid gauntlet to have thrown down in heavy metal’s latest battles for our increasingly limited attention.
https://dissentience.bandcamp.com/album/kaiju
https://www.facebook.com/dissentienceband