Equipoise - Demiurgus

*boodledop loodle dooWOODLE DOODadoo doodle*

I'm going to try to be responsible and actually check out the hundreds of promos per month that get crammed in my inbox that I've been flagrantly ignoring for 6+ years at this point.  After my bit the other day about mostly only listening to established "good" bands and only checking out new things if they have some hype behind them, I had a moment of self reflection and realized that was stupid, because despite my bad luck with obscure promos the last few years, I really am robbing myself of finding potentially great new things.  So fuck it, I'm gonna throw myself back to my teenage years when I was writing for Metal Crypt and just drowning in promos.  It's time to be A Real Reviewer again.  And with that in mind, one of the first ones I opened after six years of saying "man I really oughta tell Clawhammer I'm not fucking interested" without actually doing anything about it was the subject today, Equipoise.

Equipoise is... well, pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, and frankly this doesn't sound like all that great of a tin.  The band is ostensibly Nick Padovani pulling a Nader Sadek, that is writing a complex album all by his lonesome and then recruiting a bunch of heavyweights into a supergroup to actually put it to tape.  The problem is that Equipoise here is ludicrous tech death, and it's packed to the gills with seven members from several "names" around the scene in North America.  Just skimming all of the other bands now associated with this, we have members from Beyond Creation, Inferi, Virulent Depravity, Eternity's End, Vale of Pnath, The Faceless, Hate Eternal, Burning the Masses, Fallujah, and be surprised to learn that of course Phil Tougas in involved, so he alone also adds Chthe'ilist, First Fragment, and Zealotry to the pedigree, among a dozen or more others.  The point is that for a tech death fan this band is fucking stacked.  Even if many of the bigger names associated with the band are from new members or short lived live members, obviously all seven members of the band are loaded with more chops than a hog. 

But that's exactly the problem.  If I had told you there was a supergroup out there comprised of seven showoff wankmasters combining their forces to make a wanky jazzy tech death album that's extra proud of shoehorning in elements of flamenco, you'd likely say "Well mate that sounds like it'd be a total fucking mess".  You'd be right.  This would've blown the socks off of kids eight years or so ago when tech death started eschewing gory brutality for more high minded progginess, but the style has been on the wane in recent years if I'm still somewhat in tune with the pulse of popular metal.  Demiurgus here sounds exactly like that showy trainwreck you're imagining if every member of Beyond Creation was as determined to take center stage as the bassist (which, unsurprisingly, the representative from that band here is of course the bassist, so be prepared for an hour of bloodly woobly fretless bass masturbation). 

So the technicality is obviously off the charts here, with three incredibly talented guitarists, one of the more iconic bass sounds in the modern scene, a drummer who has played with most of the big names up there, and a full time keyboardist in a band like this obviously has to have fingers like Crazy Hand.  The problem is that all the mindbending instrumental theatrics in the world can't save a song with no hook, and Demiurgus has about as many hooks as a single fishing rod.  Most of what happens here is pure flashiness, with little else of substance going on behind the pyrotechnics of rabid showmanship.  The end result is six dudes all trying to out-solo each other at the same time while occasionally a (good) vocalist elbows his way through the frenzy to attempt to tie everything together.  It might work as a fun and frenetic blast of energy, but these guys have to try to keep the adrenaline up for a solid 14 tracks that run for over an hour, and in the end it's just completely exhausting.  It's nice that the band goes for a more proggy and melodic approach because I think that can make something of this length a bit more palatable than aiming for oppressive brutality the entire time (there's a reason that Decrepit Birth and the first Fleshgod Apocalypse album work so well), but at the end of the day it's just cacophonous disaster.

I never watched the show in full, but according to MA, the lyrics are focused on the popular anime, Fullmetal Alchemist.  What I do know of the show does work as a decent analogy for what the band is.  The inciting conflict of the show is that brothers Edward and Alphonse try to use a form of alchemical sorcery to raise their mother from the dead, and in the course of the ritual, shit goes haywire and ends up more or less killing Alphonse, dooming his soul to live on in a huge suit of armor, while Edward loses half of his limbs and needs to graft steel appendages like Ash Williams to survive.  That's what Equipoise sounds like, kids who wanted to create the impossible but at the end of the day fell victim to their hubris and are forced to shamble on forever as heretical monsters of machinery.  The brothers are the heroes in their story, but the band here instead tragic victims, felled by their own ambition.  This is the sound of a soul trapped inside a monstrous figure of inorganic inhumanity.  The idea is there, but it's an idea that's well past its expiration date and offers nothing new that the other assorted bands attached to the project don't already provide in a much more coherent fashion. 


RATING: 38%