ORIGIN – Chaosmos
Release Date: 3rd June 2022
Label: Agonia Records
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Genre: Technical Death Metal, Progressive Death Metal, Death Metal.
FFO: Brain Drill, Beneath the Massacre, First Fragment (But let’s be honest, Origin did it first.)
Review By: Eric Wilt
Since this is my first time writing a review for Metal Epidemic, I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself to you, the reader.
My name is Billy Ray Barnes. I’m told I share a last name with the greatest death metal singer of all time, but I don’t listen to death metal if I can help it, so I can’t tell you whether he’s any good or not. As for good ol’ fashioned heavy metal, I am as big a fan as anyone out there. I love heavy metal bands like AC/DC and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but my favorite metal album of all time is the Black album by Metallica. Coincidentally, Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, is the greatest drummer of all time, so it’s no wonder I love the Black album so much, but enough about me.
My assignment today is to review Chaosmos by a band called ORIGIN. As I sit here looking at the cover of the album, I’m impressed with the fancy font that their name is written in. Most bands reviewed on this website have names that look like my bathroom floor after a hard night of pounding Bud Lights, but if I squint just right, I can see that the logo does, in fact, say ORIGIN. Of course, I can’t say the same for the illustration. I’m not sure if that’s an eye or a planet or a big black hole, which we all know are fabricated by scientists in hopes of pushing their agenda down the throats of good, hard-working people like you and me. Anyway, I’d much rather see a picture of I can recognize on the cover of an album, something like a snake or a bell, but I’m keeping an open mind.
Well, so much for an open mind. I just pushed play for the first time, and I don’t think you can call what came pounding out of my speakers music. The first problem I hear is the speed of the guitars. Paul Ryan is playing so fast that I can’t make heads nor tales of what’s going on. What happened to three power chords and the truth? These guys could take a lesson from AC/DC, but that’s just the beginning. On top of the guitars being played so fast and with such precision is a bass player that doesn’t know his place. Instead of staying on the bottom two strings like all good bassists do, Mike Flores flies all over the fretboard, sometimes playing along with the guitar and sometimes complementing it. It’s a mess if you ask me. But that’s still not as bad as the drums.
If the John Longstreth had any musical knowledge at all, he’d know that his job is to keep a steady beat, preferably in 4-4. Pantera’s always been too heavy for my taste, but I respect the genuis of Darrel Abbott, RIP, and I don’t think even he’d know what to do with all these drums being randomly hit all over the place so fast you’d think the drummer got paid by the number of beats he can fit into a song. But Longstreth seems tame compared to the biggest problem I can see with ORIGIN. Namely, the vocals. In my day, a singer sang. Granted, Papa Het gets a little gruff from time to time, but you can still make out every word he says. Jason Keyser, on the other hand, uses a vocal delivery that is somewhere between a scream and a growl and is an insult to music buying people the world over. Why, it’s no wonder people are streaming instead of buying. If this is what passes for metal these days, I say save your money.
If you’re really a glutton for punishment, you could listen to songs like the title track that starts fast and heavy and doesn’t let up. I tried to count individual notes in this song, but I lost track at about a thousand, right as the heavy-as-balls breakdown kicked in. After that, there’s more showing off the fretboard prowess of Ryan and Flores, and then everything slows down except the drums, and I just don’t know what to think. Another song that contains more notes than all the songs on legendary metal band Kiss’s legendary album Psycho Circus combined is Panoptical. This song flies around the fretboard so quickly that I almost got whiplash just listening to it. Cullscape takes things to an even more outrageous level, as Keyser begins the song screaming like a man possessed by the devil, which I am against listening to on religious grounds. Finally, Nostalgia for Oblivion has a really nice groove section a couple of minutes in, but the rest of the song is just lightning-fast riffs accented by runs of three or four notes played on the high strings so quickly that I think Ryan must have had some help from those Professional Tools all the kids are talking about these days.
In the end, I really can’t recommend this album to anyone, but if ORIGIN’s brand of uber-precise technical death metal has been your thing in the past, you’re probably going to love Chaosmos. If only they didn’t play so fast and Keyser had a pleasing baritone singing voice, I might change my mind. As it is, only people who love ridiculously talented musicians playing boundary-pushing yet somehow familiar tech-death at the highest of levels will enjoy Chaosmos.
(4.5 / 5)
