February 2025 - Feature Release - The Horde Edition

My submission for the feature release this month in The Horde comes in the form of last year's debut album from Ohio's Noxis.  A death metal album with some technical and progressive signatures it is nominated for your listening pleasure and the opportunity for some reviews and maybe conversation in the thread here.

https://metal.academy/releases/52886

Okay so full disclosure, I am not the target audience for albums like this. Violence Inherent in the System is a technical death metal album that borrows heavily from the classic 1990s sounds of Cryptopsy and Dying Fetus, while I prefer the more progressive side of the sound; think The Sound of Perseverance Death or Edge of Sanity. That said, Noxis have bred a sound here that is unique to them; it does not sound like a formless imitation of those bands and instead brings them into the modern age. That modern age being some Imperial Triumphant-esque avant-garde tendencies/techniques that threw me off guard in the nicest way possible. This is a solid debut release and I sure look forward to hear if they can grow this sound through the second half of the decade and beyond.

4/5

Here is my review:

This is the debut album from Cleveland's Noxis and is an album of quite brutal and occasionally technical death metal. I love the guitar tone, it sounding thick and meaty with a marked weight to it. The production pushes the bass to the fore quite often, deliberately I am guessing because the basslines provide a point of emphasis in a number of places, especially early on. The playing is very tight, with an impressive crispness and precision as all three of the instrumentalists are in lockstep and never seem to lose a beat nor drop a note. And therein lies a bit of the downside for me. I am not advocating sloppy playing or messy production as such, but it is no secret that I am an old-school fanatic and I often find death metal that is very tight and precise comes off as a bit sterile to my ears. Noxis do counter that to some extent by veering towards a visceral brutality, which I often find to be a mitigating factor that can balance out overt technicality, at least to a degree. The vocals are, in the main, an aggressive and bullish, bellowing roar, which I like, but they do occasionally drop into "stuck-pig" mode, on second track "Blasphemous Mausoleum for the Wicked" for example, which is a style that is a particular bugbear of mine.

So there are a number of factors that work against Noxis, at least based on my normal taste profile. The technical shifts and flourishes, the very precise nature of the instrumentation and overly crisp production that often leaves me cold and the resorting to a vocal style I am not a fan of all suggest I am in for an unsatisfying experience. Yet, somehow Noxis manage to keep me onboard, probably due the suggestion of brutality they maintain throughout the runtime. This gets me through the early part of the album, which is where I think there is a greater concentration of the problematic elements for me, and sustains me enough to reach the second half which feels less technical and more in-your-face brutal. Then there is the crazy "Horns Echo Over Chorazim" which isn't only one of the most brutal-sounding tracks on the album, but also has a crazy solo section that seems to be performed by a large selection of wind instruments, such as oboe, saxophone and so on, each following the other to perform a single solo. Weird, yet strangely compelling.

The four tracks from "Horns..." onwards are more to my liking than the earlier parts of the album, with less emphasis on the technical aspects making the band sound freer, looser and more relatable for me at least. The title track, which follows "Horns.." is a formidable beast and sees the band hinting at an old-school desire to sound as intimidating as they can. There are still some interesting moments in this latter part of the album, the off-kilter guitar solo and especially prominent basswork in the middle section of "Emanations of the Sick" as well as the previously mentioned wind instrument solo in "Horns..." are inspirational and really stand out during these more brutal tracks, more so than I feel they would in the more overtly technical earlier material.

So, ultimately this was, for me, an album which started off OK without especially wowing me, but which kept me sufficiently engaged to persevere and find the buried gems that are the final four tracks. These are the motherlode of the album as far as I am concerned and would have made a killer EP, but as it is, this is a decent album of pseudo technical and brutal death metal with a killer final 22 minutes.

4/5