Four years separate Reminiscence from Convergence. Jean-Claude Rossignol plays bass on his first album with MISCREANCE here, and Andrea Feltrin sings on his second, handling the vocals from behind the drum kit, with Andrea Granauro and Tommaso Cappelletti on guitars. The project started in 2013 under the name ATOMIC MASSACRE and became MISCREANCE in 2018, so there is more history behind these two albums than the count suggests. Feltrin is doing both jobs at once for the full thirty-seven minutes. Technical thrash/death with progressive elements.
The record is presented as something the four of them 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 it tells. Those instruments are a guest's work. Leo Di Angilla plays percussion, didgeridoo, flute and berimbau across the album.
"Trait d'Union" opens on clean guitars through a flanger, dissonant and unsettled, with the sound of fingers sliding along the strings left in the take. Percussion ticks away quietly underneath. Distortion arrives around thirty seconds in and the album starts properly.
"Vision" comes next and moves at the fastest pace in the opening stretch, four minutes of the guitars and the bass holding a conversation across the song. The bass has the weight to answer back, which is worth saying because bass in this idiom usually gets flattened into the rhythm guitars. "Synaptic Cortex Dissection" is the best song here. It comes in groovy, and across five minutes it builds to a solo that pays off the wait. "Oracle's Rift" follows it and runs longest at 5:06, tense from the opening bar and keeping the pressure on for the whole length. Those two sit at the centre of the album and carry it.
"Zenith of a Dying Sun" arrives at eight and is close behind both of them. Nine tracks, 37:35, nothing past 5:06. "Mirage" fades out on an acoustic guitar outro and leaves the record close to where it started.
The vocals sound like the nineties and so does most of the writing. MISCREANCE are not doing the easy version of that. If you love DEATH, this one will give you a lot.
Follow MISCREANCE
Bandcamp · Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube · Facebook · Instagram
Order Reminiscence · Season of Mist release page
Promo provided by Season of Mist.