(Texas-based Neural Glitch released an album last year that ranked high on the year-end list of our old friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth, and just last month they released another full-length that has gotten Grover even more excited. He explains why in this review, which includes info and insights drawn from a dialogue with the project’s mastermind.)
Greetings and salutations, friends. With the sheer quantity of music that I’ve listened to in my many years on this earth, it’s become increasingly rare that I find something that really catches me by surprise these days. And yet, as you’ve no doubt surmised, it does still happen on occasion, as was the case with Neural Glitch’s debut from last year, Convinced To Obey. The absurd mix of technical death metal and sample-heavy glitch electronica reminded me in various parts of a number of different bands while still presenting something really unlike anything I’d heard before, and I was enamored enough that the album landed in the top ten on my year-end list here, standing as the only release from a band with which I was previously unfamiliar in that top ten.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that after only a year and a couple months, the band had released another album. The turnaround is especially impressive given the densely layered nature of the music here. HypNOTic ImpAIrment has actually surprised me once again, representing an impressive step forward in songwriting and general production while retaining the gloriously anarchic spirit of its predecessor. As much as I enjoyed Convinced To Obey, this is undoubtedly a better album.
As you might have noticed in the title, the capitalization is not an accident. Prior to this review I reached out to Neural Glitch’s mastermind, a dude named Chris Parker, to confirm a few things about the project (info on it is fairly scarce), and one thing he confirmed is that he received a number of accusations of using AI in the creation of Convinced To Obey. While I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised given the nature of the music, it doesn’t take much listening to be able to tell that these songs are carefully crafted with intent and direction, with no generative AI used. Still, the formatting of the title HypNOTic ImpAIrment is both a disclaimer and a mission statement that all of this music is created entirely by humans.
I also asked Parker about the artists featured on this album, as at the time of this review the album credits had not been released. He confirmed that he plans on releasing the album credits once he gets the physical media sorted out, but he wrote, recorded, and mixed all of the songs and programmed the drums (he is a drummer, but it was financially easier to program the drums and have them sound exactly right). He also worked with a number of studio musicians, with rhythm guitarist Joao Corceiro, lead guitarist Juani, bassists Jeff Plant and Bruno Tysak Fichera, and vocalists Androo O’Hearn of Shaolin Death Squad and Silent Rick. (Juani, Plant, and O’Hearn also worked on Convinced To Obey.) The performances are individually impressive, especially given how demanding the ever-changing music can be.
And make no mistake, HypNOTic ImpAIrment is perhaps even more demanding than Convinced To Obey. There are still a massive number of samples (there’s a brilliant Beastie Boys “Kick it!” at a key moment in ‘Warning’ and a hilarious Disturbed sample in ‘Sanitized’ among many, many others), but there’s also more of a prog rock influence that shines through on a number of tracks, like the acoustic guitar intro on ‘Beneath The Flesh’ or the early moments of ‘Chemical Lies’. There’s also a greater amount of clean vocals on this album, further contributing to a sense of matured songwriting, and also a lot more blackened, higher-pitched screams, often layered together with the deeper gutturals. It can still be a very chaotic album, with each song containing between 60-80 individual audio tracks, but it’s a testament to Parker’s skill with composition that these songs work incredibly well and don’t wind up as a jumbled mess.
And then there’s the cover of Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’. Now, Convinced To Obey had an ’80s cover sandwiched in the middle of the album, in this case The Police’s ‘Synchronicity II’, and as I was unfamiliar with the original track I initially thought that it was just an odd, Devin Townsend-esque detour. Well, HypNOTic ImpAIrment has its own ’80s cover, and I’m much more familiar with ‘Rio’, which was one of the biggest hits of the ’80s. Here it’s transformed, with skittering synths and slap bass, clean vocals layered with blackened screeches, and if that sounds like a terrible idea to you, well, you’re fucking wrong, because this version is fantastic. It’s already a stupidly catchy earworm of a song with a killer bassline, and Parker simply takes what’s already there and runs wild with it.
As with the first album, it’s incredibly difficult to really pin down the Neural Glitch sound. I asked Parker about his influences and they were predictably varied, from classic death metal like Suffocation and Death, to more experimental bands like Mr. Bungle and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, to prog rock like Pink Floyd and Yes, to electronic-leaning acts like Celldweller and Grim Salvo. A few of these acts I had guessed at myself; there’s some percussion on album-closer ‘Sanitized’ that really sounds like something from Celdweller precursor Circle Of Dust, and there’s a number of times where the bass sounds like something from UnexpecT. But it’s the way that these disparate influences are applied, without being derivative, that really makes Neural Glitch special.
Ironically, the band that Neural Glitch reminds me of the most is one that Parker was unfamiliar with. France’s Pryapisme, who as far as I can tell are on an extended hiatus or are broken up entirely, mixed metal with esoteric electronic spaz-outs and oddball samples in a way that I had never heard before, and while Neural Glitch might do some marginally similar things, the approaches are still markedly different, and that’s one of the things I really like about both bands.
Music is a business, and when a band or a sound becomes popular there’s inevitably a rush of imitators. It’s unfortunately rare to find a musical project that really doesn’t sound that much like anything else, and while Neural Glitch might be influenced by bands that have come before, there’s really not any bands you can point to and say, Yeah, they’re basically just doing what this other band already did. Even when you find a section that reminds you of something, all you need to do is wait twenty seconds or so and you’ll find that you’re on to something else entirely. And I love that creativity.
So, yeah, HypNOTic ImpAIrment fucking rules. It’s heavy, it’s unpredictable, and it’s fun as hell. There’s a lot to discover here, and it’s the kind of album that rewards repeat listens. I’ve been running through it a fair bit in the run-up to this review, because it took some time to really get my head around it, and I’m still constantly noticing new details every time I listen. I don’t doubt that this is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but hopefully some of you reading this review will take the time to check it out and realize just how damn good it is. I for one can guarantee you’ll be seeing this album again at year’s end when I put together my list.
https://neuralglitch.bandcamp.com/album/hypnotic-impairment
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