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Martyr: Feeding the abscess

29/03/07 || The Duff

For the past three months or so, I’ve been listening to technical death metal on an almost exclusive basis, so when reviews of Martyr’s latest endeavor began making the rounds on the internet, my curiosity in their efforts immediately peaked. However, upon listening to a couple of taster tracks off the band’s Myspace page (namely “The Feast of Vermin” and “Havoc”), I must admit that my interest in the band was rapidly put out of mind, and the idea of purchasing “Feeding the Abscess” dismissed equally quickly. I think it was the vocals that chiefly put me off, making the album remind me very much of Extol’s “Synergy” (an album that at first dazzled with impressive guitar work, but ultimately failed to hold my interest for long due to the annoying vocal delivery and the band’s excessive bending over and parting astride for the Jesus). Luckily, the two aforementioned tracks sure did have some great hooks, and seeing as The End Records halve their delivery costs upon the ordering of a second CD, I decided to pair Minsk’s “The Ritual Fires of Abandonment” with this, as I was soon to find out, little gem.

Apparently, “Feeding the Abscess” is a long awaited follow-up, as Marty’s previous work, titled “Warp Zone”, is nowadays considered quite the classic. Luckily, the six year break between both releases has been incredibly good to these Canucks (dunno which part from Canada they’re from, but I ain’t splitting hairs – I’m kinda racist like that), as musically these chaps have evolved into something truly spectacular. I can’t say I’m too familiar with their 2000 effort, but after having given it a couple of spins over the past couple of weeks, I can see why such praise is bestowed upon it; yet at the same time I believe that this album here trounces it in almost every regard. With “Feeding the Abscess”, Martyr have carved out a far less conventional death metal album, focusing more on producing fluid compositions that, although not catchy in the most obvious sense, seem to provide more on a musical front. What you are ultimately served is an album heavily influenced by the likes of Atheist, Cynic and Death, comprising material both gracefully and precisely executed, with nothing overdone and the structure of the entire song always in mind (a rarity in tech death, I might add). The album is blessed with an absolute heavenly production that offers supreme clarity to each instrument whilst retaining that much required crunch for the heavier sections, and every track transitions from one part to the next seamlessly so as to give rise to one of the most complete albums I’ve heard in some time.

“Feeding the Abscess” doesn’t exactly start where “Warp Zone” left off, but a riff used on the last track of this album’s predecessor is used on “Perpetual Healing (Infinite Pain)”. Whether this is the band’s way of saying “We fucked off for six years, but the Martyr you see before you is still the same group of people playing the same ol’ shit they’re known for!”, or the band suggesting that there is a concept tying together all of their albums is of little importance to me, as the music presented on “Feeding the Abscess”, although containing parts that are somewhat reminiscent of the band’s past incarnation (occasionally similar ideas are used, and the soloing styles remain very much the same, if only slobbering less frequently over the Vai cock), all in all these guys have cut away so much fat from their sound that they almost sound like a different band. Sure, “Warp Zone” is a great album, filled with riffs aplenty, but some of the quirky ideas used, great though they were, appeared a bit gimmicky and playful in a show-off kind of way; none of that is to be found here (except for the Star Wars theme tune that appears somewhere during “Lost In Sanity”, that somehow fits amazingly well), where every note played appears to be part of some greater whole.

The drumming on this album is flawless, and very, very tasty; the guy hardly ever blasts, preferring instead to focus on fancy kick work and sweet n’ sexy drum-fills. In many ways Patrice Hamelain reminds me of Conny Petersson of Anata, for although there are more technically outstanding drummers out there, these guys manage to stay atop of the pile with the best of them simply by being incredibly interesting drummers (and not so much the blast-fill-blast-fill-break-cymbals-blast-fill variety, if you know what I mean). The production awarded to this album is of such a high standard that you can even hear the fucken bass, and at times Francois Mongrain is given free reign to start flying around the fretboard somewhat (the guy is clearly just as talented as the guitarists). In the end, the almost hardcore vocals actually fit the music quite well, as this album isn’t really much of a death metal release; it’s more of a jazz-fusion album with distorted guitars and death metal elements (the low-end guttural growls ain’t of the highest standard anyways, so there minimal use is probably a good thing), yet another reason for which “Feeding the Abscess” stands out so much in comparison to all the other tech death efforts of 2006. Don’t get me wrong, Spawn of Possession, Gorod, Psycroptic etc. have all released some absolutely stunning material this past year, but at times it all gets to sound very similar in kind when their respective efforts are listened to in succession; Martyr’s latest doesn’t suffer from this at all, because everything is presented in such a laid-back manner.

In short, this is a really easy album to digest, simply because it isn’t one hundred percent frenetically executed, and definitely one of the year’s better releases – highly recommended.

8 Steve Vai cocks out of 10.

Information
Released: 2006
Label: Galy Records
Website: www.martyr-canada.com/
Band
Francois Mongrain: bass, vocals
Daniel Mongrain: guitars, vocals
Martin Carbonneau: guitars
Patrice Hamelain: drums

Tracklist
1. Perpetual Healing (Infinite Pain)
2. Lost in Sanity
3. Feast of Vermin
4. Interlude – Desolate Ruins
5. Havoc
6. Nameless, Faceless, Neverborn
7. Silent Science
8. Felony
9. Dead Horizon, Pt. 1: Echoes of the Unseen
10. Dead Horizon, Pt. 2: Romancing Ghouls
11. Dead Horizon, Pt. 3: Stasis Field
12. Dead Horizon, Pt. 4: Shellshocked
13. Brain Scan

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