Nucleus - Entity

Whocleus?

Let's flash back to 2016 for a moment, and take a sentence out of my own review for Nucleus's debut, Sentient back when that was new.

"I don't tend to look towards a band's future all that often, but I can see them being the type of band who really pulls it together on the sophomore effort."

I uhh... wasn't exactly correct.

This is a bummer, because I want to love Nucleus.  I love that Chicago has a band that has real name recognition on a national stage, I love that these dudes are all my age and absolutely crushing it harder than I ever could (which is less impressive now that I'm creeping up on 30 but cut me some slack), but man have they proven themselves to be frustrating to me.  I thought their debut was good and showed a lot of promise, but in hindsight I think I overrated it a tad purely out of fear since I bump into these guys at shows all the time and they know who I am (well, really just Dano but hey).  Now that I'm just a total hermit who only leaves the house to buy toilet paper and fast food, I feel a bit more confident in just admitting that Entity is a disappointment.

Nucleus seems to be a rarity where their full lengths are always their weakest offerings.  The Colony and Hegemony are excellent EPs that rightfully earned them all the hype they had rolling into their debut, which wound up being pretty flawed and only really standing out during the slower, more crushing moments (the best track, "Cube", was featured on Hegemony as well), only for them to follow that up with the Fragmented Self split with Macabra which showed them absolutely honing in on their strengths and delivering three monstrously punishing tracks.  I was hoping that was a sign of things to come for Entity, since that split finally saw them sounding like their own band instead of a Demilich/Timeghoul worship act, but here we are, another full length where they leaned in extra hard on the Demilichisms and lost their identity again.

While the debut sounded like a blend of that weird Finndeath of the early 90s with Demilich and Adramelech mixed with the early definition of American technical death metal like Nocturnus, Entity seems them erring further towards the Finndeath side and again coming off as pretenders to a throne that can never be usurped.  We already have Demilich, we already have Tucker-era Morbid Angel, we already have Gorguts, we have plenty of spacey and dissonant death metal already and Nucleus isn't standing out nearly as strongly as something like Blood Incantation in the realm of modern bands doing this sort of thing.

That's not to say they or this album are bad necessarily, just kinda safe for a weird DM offshoot, if that makes sense.  Fans of this "Timelich" style are going to love this, but for me, I just wish there was more to it than by-the-numbers Timelich.  Entity is a step up in some respects from Sentient, but it's just kinda inverted.  The debut struggled to keep my attention during the fast parts but had some menacing midpaced sections that absolutely crushed my spine.  The sophomore has much better and more interesting fast moments (and far more frequently as well), but there are very few single moments that shatter my skull like in "Swarm", "Cube", or "Extirpate".  This is much more Gorguts-y on the whole as well, which might sound weird since I just said this is also more Demilich than ever before, but really those two bands mix together so well that it's only a natural combination of influences to have.  This whole album is very dissonant and chaotic, and it works for what it is, it's just not as exciting as the last album.  There are great moments here still, for sure.  The three minute mark of "Arrival" is fucking scary in how destructive and explosive it is, "Mobilization" opens on one of those pummeling Suffocation riffs that I loved so much from before, and I adore the creepy acoustic/bass-heavy intro of "Approach".  But the standouts themselves are kinda few and far between, and the album instead tends to sit on something of a plateau throughout the runtime.  And admittedly, if those midpaced moments actually are heavier than the debut, then I might not even have noticed purely for how distant and fuzzy the production is.  It certainly helps the album feel chaotic and alien, but it doesn't do any favors in the realm of actual heaviness.

I've probably made this sound worse than it actually is, and that's my own failing.  This album isn't bad, it's solid, it's just less than what I was hoping for and I can't help but let that cloud my judgment I suppose.  This is only a marginal improvement from the debut, and that's only because the part that was lacking before is improved while the part that was a standout before is now unremarkable.  So now, across the board it's a slight step up, but at the sacrifice of notable standout moments.  Simply put, it's not a very exciting release.  And that sucks.


RATING: 65%