PILLORY - Evolutionary Miscarriage

July 29, 2014, 9 years ago

(Unique Leader Records)

Greg Pratt

Rating: 7.0

review pillory heavy metal

PILLORY - Evolutionary Miscarriage

This Boston-based technical death metal band's second album represents a bit of a turning point for me personally. Having been listening to, and loving, technical death metal for years and years and years, the urge to hear simpler songs has been getting stronger and stronger inside me for a while now. Technical death metal has become something I love for a few songs then my eyes turn into giant Xs and I just blank out, the tunes washing over me in a pleasant fashion but not really hitting me like I'd want them to. So, nothing too personal, Pillory: you guys play amazingly skillful technical death metal, which genre junkies will devour. I dig some of the truly progressive elements, as found in tunes like "Distorted Axiom" and "Phantasmagorial Beasts": they offer a bit of breathing room and do take the listener on a bit of an adventure. And "Imbeciles In Defiance" has a good structure, almost making it memorable, almost making it a song. But elsewhere it's just so much of everything, nothing sticking for more than 1 second before moving into the next fill, tempo change, and micro-blast introducing the next micro-fill. The players are all locked together amazingly, the double-bass chugging like deathcore taken to new levels, but while moments like the outer-space freakout in the title track do offer a bit of respite, man, I'm just being beaten black and blue here, and I don't really know if I enjoy it. Technical death metal... something needs to happen to make this genre a bit more inviting again. Bands like Pillory have the skills, but whether or not they want to craft something that sticks next time remains to be seen.



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