WORMED

Disclaimer: impatient Blabbermouth forum denizens, who become easily irritable when faced by color commentary, can follow this to the end of this review...courtesy of advanced technology provided by WORMED.

As imaginary soundtracks for "The Matrix" movies go, WORMED's "Exodromos" would work quite nicely...so long as you were cheering for the machines to win!

Now, now, don't take this the bad way; this Spanish quintet of automatons doesn't want you dead - only dreaming a fully believable fantasy life where you buy multiple copies of their records, naturally.

Nor do they hate your slimy, yucky, non-silicon guts (well, maybe a little) because they help you FEEL emotions conveyed by their synchronized sound waves on this, their sophomore album.

Hence WORMED's return to the sound of cyborgs performing technical death metal, unfailingly and rather dispassionately, to the point that even the band's uniformly nihilistic feelings fail to resonate convincingly on early outbursts like "Nucleon" and "The Nonlocality Trilemma", these being merely machine-like approximations of "feelings," after all.

But while the band's accomplished brand of musical robotic warfare, rife with stop-on-a-dime thrills and djent-ish contortions, can take some getting used to, anyone who values a little strategically inserted contrast - dynamic and emotional - amid their end-world techno-apocalypse soundtracks will eventually find a few melodic and/or calmer scraps in lyrically confounding musical formulas like "Tautochrone" and "Darkflow Quadrivium".

Something almost resembling a man-machine truce is saved for closing anomaly, "Xenoverse Discharger", but until then, the only wholesale suspension of hostilities comes via the romantically (ahem!) named "Solar Neutrinos", which admittedly provides but a brief system reboot before the wanton maiming and killing resumes anew at the iron claws of "Multivectorial Reionization", "Techkinox Wormhole", etc.

Oh yes, the song titles...you noticed?

Clearly, WORMED takes their science - fiction or non-fiction - quite seriously, which can only mean that, one day, astro-physicists-in-training may well look back on "Exodromos" with the same fondness as budding serial killers now remember CARCASS' daunting taxonomy texts of yesteryear.

In all seriousness, there's something to be said for an album that delivers such a complete, claustrophobically enveloping experience that requires some patience to penetrate, but then keeps the listener rapt, digging for further musical details well beyond the first few spins - well done!

[wormhole exit]

PLOP!

"Exodromos" offers technical death metal with industrial nuances and lyrics based on astronomy.