Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Pan.Thy.Monium - Khaooohs & Kon-Fus-Ion (1996)

There's a knack to the avant-garde in terms of how measured you want to be with the more experimental aspects of your sound.  Swanö and co. here have the tap on full and are just letting the innovation pour out.  It does get to the point of nearly overflowing on more than one occasion but never quite becomes a flood.

The death metal parts are great and create all the necessary walls of noise you could ever want to hear on any death metal record.  The effects/saxophone/whatever else is going on here do often sit in complete juxtaposition to the rest of the music, which is sort of the point of course.  Whilst this is necessary for the overall direction of the album, I find it hard to believe that all of it is needed.  There are times when it just sounds experimental for experiments sake and it doesn't really bring anything to the record.

My favourite track on the album is not even a death metal one.  Behrial is a kind of ambient piece, using keys to great effect to create an almost Jean Michel Jarre esque soundscape.  It is the most settled and assured piece of music on here by a long chalk.  It sounds like it perhaps was recorded by a different artist or was mean't for another record altogether though, despite my enjoyment of it.

The album is well named and not many fans would pick this up and expect a familiar structure of death metal like you would on a Cannibal Corpse record.  It does however come off as being a tad too chaotic and confusing for me.