Our review of "Reminiscence", the second album by MISCREANCE, is now live — and we gave it a 9/10. The record arrives tomorrow, August 28, via Season Of Mist.
Four years separate it from "Convergence", though the count undersells the history. The project started in 2013 as ATOMIC MASSACRE and only became MISCREANCE in 2018. Jean-Claude Rossignol plays bass on his first album with the band; Andrea Feltrin sings on his second, handling every vocal from behind the drum kit for the full thirty-seven minutes, with Andrea Granauro and Tommaso Cappelletti on guitars.
The band present the album as something they found rather than wrote. Rossignol calls it a lost album from an unknown civilization, futuristic and extremely primitive at the same time, reached by collective hallucination and a voyage backwards through time. Cappelletti has said they wanted this one tied to a concept, and that the added instruments deepen the connection to the story. Those instruments are guest work: Leo Di Angilla plays percussion, didgeridoo, flute and berimbau across the record.
What struck us hardest was the bass. In technical thrash and death metal it usually gets flattened into the rhythm guitars, and here it has the weight to answer back — "Vision" is four minutes of the guitars and the bass holding a conversation across the song. "Synaptic Cortex Dissection" is the best thing on the album, coming in groovy and building across five minutes to a solo that pays off the wait, and "Oracle's Rift" follows it tense from the opening bar. Those two sit at the centre and carry the record.
Nine tracks, 37:35, nothing past 5:06 — an album that never outstays an idea. "Trait d'Union" opens on clean guitars through a flanger with the sound of fingers sliding along the strings left in the take, and "Mirage" fades out on an acoustic outro that leaves the record close to where it started.
The vocals sound like the nineties and so does most of the writing, but MISCREANCE are not doing the easy version of that. As we put it in the review: if you love DEATH, this one will give you a lot.