(Today Willowtip Records is releasing a new album by the UK band Cognizance, and that means it’s time for our tech-death-addicted scribbler DGR to hold forth on its abundant merits.)

A two-year turnaround on a Cognizance album is exciting news. The UK-based group have been one of tech-death’s semi-unsung heroes since they started releasing full albums in 2019 after having existed prior on a string of EPs. They play a style of tech-death so tightly wound and with such precision that – as has been a constant worry – one would think that even the slightest change would be the equivalent of a butterfly landing on a car aiming to set a landspeed record, even the slightest weight sending the thing toppling end over end and into fiery collision. Sometimes, one can listen to a Cognizance song, hear how surgically precise they are, and think that such a thing might even happen within the boundaries of the same song.

Which is why it is impressive that on a first pass with Cognizance’s newest album In Light, No Shape – soon to be released by Willowtip Records – you would never guess that the band were now operating as a four-piece with long-tenured vocalist Henry Pryce having stepped down, because on In Light, No Shape, Cognizance sound just as fierce and knife-sharp as they’ve ever sounded for 10 songs and thirty-seven-and-a-half minutes of deft guitar work, head-twisting drums, and ground-cracking bass, all punctuated by an equally surgical vocal attack on top of it. Somehow, the machine that is Cognizance remains as tightly wound as ever. Continue reading »

(DGR reviews the new album from Cognizance, out 26 January on Willowtip Records)

It wasn’t too long ago we were joking about how Cognizance were one of the better bands when it comes to the “riff-avalanche” style of album – the type of disc that generally picks one particular tempo and sticks to it, leaving the band room to just rattle off part-after-part-after-part atop the listener until, by the end of it, they’ve basically been buried underneath a pile of stuff.

It’s a difficult balance to strike because you can easily get lost in your own creativity and create big, overwhelming works that, by their very nature, are hard to maintain any interest in since everything is so ephemeral and fleeting.

And while Cognizance have remained a sleek and ultra-precise machine for over a decade since the release of their first full length – after having subsisted on a series of singles and EPs – they’ve also slowly hammered and forged their sound into something as fiercely creative and memorably groove-ridden as it is terrifyingly technically-proficient.

Their previous album, Upheaval, picked up where Malignant Dominion left off, and I’ll give you three guesses as to where Phantazein picks up as a starting point a little under two and a half years later.

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(In late September Prosthetic Records released the second album by the UK band Cognizance, and better late than never we hope, DGR gives it the following very enthusiastic review.)

Upheaval, the newest album by tech-death group Cognizance, looks pretty standard if you go by tale-of-the-tape measurements for a disc, at ten songs and a little over thirty-three minutes. But one of the things that stands out with Upheaval – once you get past the eye-popping artwork – is that this is an album that fucking moves.

It may sound like a joke at first, but Cognizance waste absolutely no time with this one. The band find their groove early and stick to it for a half hour, and often you don’t even notice the time going by until the opening drum hit of “Hymns” reminds you that you’re back at song one.

Cognizance are brutally efficient with their time on Upheaval and it quickly lands the band in the ‘rolling landslide of riffs’ category of albums. You throw the thing on, it just bowls you over, and then the process starts anew. Which can sound wild at first, because it gives the impression that Upheaval kind of blasts by you without a second thought, but then you start breaking it down into individual songs and you realize that because the bar is set so high, so early on, that what is happening here is that Cognizance became ruthless in making hammering tech-death tracks in the interim. Continue reading »