The Artisan Era seems to have swiftly taken over as the label du jour for frantic and noodly tech death. Ten years ago when the genre exploded after seemingly everybody decided at once that Necrophagist was the best band ever and we all need to sound like them right now, you could guess with like 99% accuracy that any given tech death album was going to be released on Unique Leader or Willowtip. Now that I've been getting back into the style after many years of burnout, I can't help but notice that both labels seem to have begun focusing on brutality more than tech outright. To help fill the void of this particular niche that once saturated the death metal scene to a near toxic degree, Artisan Era seems to have been the one to have taken the torch, currently championing some of the hottest noodlecore bands in the market right now (both good and bad) with Inferi, Augury, Virulent Depravity, Equipoise, The Odious Construct, and many others, including our subject today (a band poached from Unique Leader, oddly enough), Inanimate Existence.
These California boys apparently have a pretty impressive career behind them already, one that I'm completely unfamiliar with since they started right around the time I grew bored of their style, so my first impression of them is actually their fifth offering, Clockwork. While it's a good record, it does suffer from being somewhat faceless. These eight songs are all insane, full speed ahead monsoons of blasts and riffage with a fat injection of obscene amounts of melody, but they fall into the common trap of failing to present many lasting hooks and memorable songs. Instead we just get forty unremarkable minutes of decent melodic tech death that fly by inoffensively enough. I like the specific niche within the scene that they occupy, sounding very similar to Decrepit Birth or Gorod with how much overt melody they cram into all of these songs, but they don't stack up to those titans by any means. Their main hook is the soaring, Mithras-styled lead guitar lines that pretty much never stop, with occasional jazzy breaks here and there but they're all short and unobtrusive. And hey man, that's a good hook, Decrepit Birth showed out how it can be a god damned artform, but despite their bountiful career at this point, it doesn't seem like Inanimate Existence has quite mastered it.
Unfortunately that's really about all there is to say about this. There isn't a whole lot of substance beyond "decent tech death" and that's a shame. Apparently the lyrics are all centered around the philosophical idea of absurdism, which I think is endlessly fascinating and Albert Camus is one of my favorite thinkers of the last century, but unfortunately simply due to the nature of the music here you'd have no way of actually knowing that without looking at the lyrics separately. So it's a cool idea that's hidden entirely by the bland but well performed blastery and weedlywees. I think the closest thing to a standout track here is something like "Ocean" or "Apophenia", but honestly it's hard to tell because everything sounds pretty much the same. Like I said, it's very faceless and inoffensive production-line tech death with little else going for it. Inanimate Existence is a solid band and Clockwork is a solid album but that's really all there is to it, nothing beyond that.
RATING: 69%
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