In the hyper-competitive world of hyper-technical death metal, it takes some thinking to stand out from the modern day brat pack of longhaired lugnuts grinding away on stage. I have no idea how humanity has progressed to the point where seemingly every death metal band can pull off technical feats that would have been mind-blowing five years back, but it has, so sometimes pulling back is what works best.

Case in point, France’s GOROD, who, on A Perfect Absolution, their fourth album, have actually created a full concept album in under 40 minutes. And even though it’s a concept album, it’s not tough to listen to. So, yup: pulling back.

“We wanted to be efficient, and just give the best collection of our new songs,” says guitarist Mathieu Pascal. “We now prefer to release a rather short LP every two years instead of releasing a sixty minute album every three or four years. It's simpler to produce, simpler to build. As you say, for this style of music, it's better not to be too long, because in the end listeners can't remember all the songs.”

In the land of technical death metal, remembering songs is not always an easy feat. But it might actually be possible with A Perfect Absolution. This was, after all, the album this very scribe described as “arena-ready” death metal in a review on this site, a remark that makes vocalist Julien “Nutz” Deyres a bit upset (all in jest, of course).

“It makes me feel angry! Very very angry! (laughs) I think that anyone can express their feelings when they listen to music and that's really interesting how different some reactions can be,” says Deyres. “To be honest, I don't really understand exactly what your appreciation is about, but it sounds quite nice to my ears.”

The band, who have recently signed with Unique Leader records in North America after a long relationship with Willowtip, display lots of influences from outside the metal world on the new album, but never in a showy way.

“Oh, we have a lot of non-metal influences,” says Pascal. “I have a really large jazz-fusion-world music background and I do my best to incorporate these aspects to my songs. I hate making the same song twice, so I really try to be as varied as I can, by changing tempos or ambiences, always looking for something I never did before. It can be a new guitar technique, or a new weird drum pattern, things like that... I love when an album is like a journey, you can travel through songs as you would cross countries and different landscapes. But it must sound metal at every moment, and that's often the hardest part of writing cohesive songs... but that's what I like (laughs).”

For Deyres, the album is special because it’s his full-length debut singing for the band. He says he feels very proud of it, especially because the songs were composed in such a short period of time: he actually finished the lyrics the day before the band hit the studio.

“Gorod is actually used to having more time to compose and write their albums, but this time it was a total rush,” says Deyres. “But, as we can hear in the result, it can have positive action on creation, because I think that this album is more straight forward but also contains more diversity than previous efforts. I simply feel really satisfied with the work done.”

For more on Gorod, check out the band's Facebook page.