(Below we present Professor D. Grover the XIIIth’s review of a new album by the northern Italian quartet Miscreance, which was released by Season of Mist in late August.)
Greetings and salutations, friends. There have been an increasing number of bands in recent years who are mining the early days of the tech-death subgenre for influence, to varying degrees of success. It’s a reasonable assumption that most of these bands grew up listening to classics like Human or Piece Of Time or Testimony Of The Ancients, especially with the internet making it so much easier to access and discover the sort of album that was fairly obscure at the time of release.
Miscreance caught my attention in 2022 with their full-length debut Convergence, and while I didn’t do the NCS review, I was sufficiently impressed that it wound up in the number 6 spot on my year-end list here, beating out releases from some of my favorite bands of all time. They’ve been on my mind ever since, and I was pretty darn excited when word came that their follow-up was coming.
Photo by Jacopo Abbruscato
Reminiscence doesn’t deviate much from what Miscreance did on their first album, but that’s definitely not a complaint. If you were to judge this album solely by its cover, there’s a pretty reasonable possibility that you might reach the conclusion that it sounds like Atheist, and while that doesn’t really tell the whole story, it’s a good starting point. I mean, look at that logo. Specifically, Miscreance’s style borrows heavily from the likes of Death, Pestilence, Cynic, and yes, Atheist (among other bands of the period), engaging in the sort of highly technical thrashy death metal that emerged from Florida in the late ’80s. And to be honest, they’re not exactly shy about their influences.
There are a lot of riffs and leads, laid down by the formidable guitar duo of Andrea Granauro and Tommaso Cappelletti, that will vaguely remind you of those aforementioned bands. There’s moments of tribal percussion that recall the late, great Sean Reinert of Cynic (and Death’s Human album). Drummer Andrea Feltrin is also the vocalist (shades of Autopsy and Nocturnus) and is a dead ringer for former Pestilence vocalist Martin Van Drunen. And there’s the impressive work of bassist Jean-Claude Rossingnol, whose twangy tone helps to accentuate his contributions and recalls Tony Choy on Unquestionable Presence.
It’s important to note that, much like on Convergence or Hemotoxin’s similarly excellent 2024 album When Time Becomes Loss, recalling these various influences does not mean that Reminiscence is derivative. There is no shortage of bands, in a lot of styles of metal, that sound like and/or pay homage to bands that came before. Sometimes it feels like you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an HM-2 powered Entombed clone or a lurching Bolt Thrower acolyte, and that’s alright. Neither of those bands are still active, and there’s nothing wrong with keeping the spirit of the classics alive.
Miscreance fill a similar niche with their music. Cynic hasn’t released anything that sounds like Focus since, well, Focus. Matt Harvey is doing his best to carry the torch of Death with some of the late Chuck Schuldiner’s various bandmates. Atheist has released one album since 1993, and that was still 16 years ago. And while Pestilence is still active, it’s been the Patrick Mameli show for years and is arguably a mere shadow of its former self.
With all that said, Reminiscence doesn’t quite (thus far, at least) hit like Convergence. This comes with the caveat that I’ve been listening to Convergence on and off for four years, whereas I’ve been listening to Reminiscence for about a week. It feels a bit more scattered, not having quite as many hooks, but it’s really the type of album that I need more time to absorb. It’s still an excellent release, though, from an extremely talented quartet of musicians, and I would be very surprised if I can’t find a spot for it on my year-end list. It’s definitely worth a listen if you yearn for the old days of death metal.
https://orcd.co/miscreancereminiscence
https://miscreance.bandcamp.com/album/reminiscence
https://www.facebook.com/Miscreance/