Technical death metal has become dull and boring, too many years of too many time signatures just annihilating the listener’s ears, leaving the genre without much of interest in 2017. Apparently, this cynical memo never hit the desk of space-age squadron Origin, who just keep going, crafting albums that manage to be technical but highly listenable and—this is important—full of energy. While lots of tech death sounds like it was created by robots, the songs on Unparalleled Universe explode with life: opener “Infinitesimal To The Infinite” has an absurd amount of zest and passion, and swirling tech-death riffs to die for, the band announcing right away that there will be no filler here (41 minutes is a perfect length for an album of this intensity), and that there will be no messing around whatsoever. 

Killer opener, and it leads into tech-fest “Accident And Error”, a phenomenal song that shows the band can grind straight when needed but sound even better when zigging and zagging a touch. Origin always do the breathing-room slow crawl well too, “Invariance Under Transformation” here giving the listener a slight respite before the slaughter continues for four more songs, including the jaw-dropping drum workout “Burden Of Prescience” and the 10-minute “Unequivocal”, which spends its last half building to a peak the likes of which Origin have never before scaled. Confusingly, and kinda awesomely, the whole thing ends off with a Brujeria cover, which was something I never saw coming.