Venenum - Trance of Death (2017)^{Release ID: 13185}

I'm not a huge afficionado of modern death metal and it's seeming obsession with brutality and violence, other than a few long-established acts like Nile, Vader and Behemoth. My preference was always for the very early, looser death and death doom sound and later Opeth's accomplished, progressive take on the genre. Recently, however, my curiosity has been piqued by albums like Blood Incantation's Hidden History of the Human Race and their incorporation of other genres like psychedelia, space rock, and progressive metal, much in the way that Oranssi Pazuzu have done with black metal. In searching out similarly ambitious death metal, I found myself here with Venenum's 2017 debut (and currently sole) full-length.
The album begins in novel style with a cello(?) and piano intro track, which is not, generally speaking, the way death metal bands set out their stall, before launching headlong into Merging Nebular Drapes which rattles along at a right old pace and allows the band to demonstrate their technical proficiency yet retains a certain old-school looseness without becoming excessively tight and narcissistic, unlike so many tech-death acts.
The Nature of the Ground's blackened death fires off the albums most brutal sounding salvo before it grinds to a sudden halt and an initially slow, but ever-quickening, guitar call and response lead into a renewing of the aural assault.
Cold Threat is a towering, threatening beast that begins with a slow riff and wailing guitar work that then transcends into some righteous Death-worship.
Then we come to the three-part epic, the title track, which spans the entirety of side two of the vinyl release and is what elevates the album to classic status. Part one, Reflections, continues the album in similar vein to side one's fairly aggressive prog-death, albeit with a greater frequency of time changes. Part two Metanoia Journey, an instrumental section, is more psych-influenced, a bit like a death metal Pink Floyd, the guitar work sounding heavily influenced by Dave Gilmour's work on tracks like Echoes or Comfortably Numb and keyboards to match. The album closes with the fourteen-minute climax, Part III: There Are Other Worlds..., a track that is one moment flying high with soaring guitar leads and the next plummeting headlong with a vicious vocal section, all the while forging ahead to the inevitable all-out controlled chaos of the album's climactic end.
For my money, this is one of the greatest examples of 21st century death metal and, along with Blood Incantation's aforementioned Hidden History of the Human Race, the reason I'm getting enthusiastic about death metal once again.