OK, so even though I've gotten pretty bored with most of the stuff that has been coming out of the Death Metal scene over the past decade, every once in a while I come across a band that is twisted and unique and completely kicks my ass. And when I hear that a band is compared to the mighty Gorguts, and the band themselves cite the Canadian avant-death gods as well as Morbid Angel, Ravi Shankar, Al Di Meola, and Spastic Ink as their primary influences, that's added impetus for me to check 'em out. That's what led me to Embryonic Devourment, whose debut album just came out on Deepsend. Fear Of Reality Exceeds Fantasy falls in the tech-death camp, but there are so many things about this band that are fucking weird that this album is one of the most interesting death metal debuts I've heard since, well, since the post-Gorguts outfit Negativa released their self titled debut. The first thing that struck me when I picked up Fear Of Reality... was Tony Koehl's album artwork depicting vicious reptilian aliens and weird occult symbology. I recognized his work from the last album from local deathgrinders Beyond Fatal and the newest from Heavy Lord; that style of old-school sci-fi themed painting has always been my favorite kind of death metal album art. But then I threw the album in, and after a couple of minutes found myself getting more and more baffled by what I was hearing. The music was hyper-technical progressive death/grind, super fast and brutal, and of course insanely complex with tons of intricate shredding and squiggly atonal leads, complex riffing and labyrinthian song structures. And the drumming is awesome, spitting out a dynamic mix of hyperspeed blastbeats and complicated drum fills. But there are also these weirder elements that began to manifest in the songs. Riffing quickly becomes deformed and really dissonant and jagged, which is where these guys really start to resemble the avant-gardisms of Gorguts' Obscura, and then there are the strange jazz fusion breaks that show up in the midst of the blasting shredfests. The band breaks into a trippy drug-addled tribal chorus on "Woolded And Keelhauled". The bass player goes off on some totally technical, jazz-informed detours with his playing, and I don't hear that very often with this kind of brutal tech-death. And then for the last couple of minutes of the album, the band goes off on a big tribal drum jam.

The lyrical themes of Fear Of Reality Exceeds Fantasy deserve mention too, as the bulk of the songs on the album deal with a weird conspiracy theory involving reptilian aliens and global leaders - shades of David Icke? The combination of those reptoid visions and the quirky technical death metal and jazz/percussive elements makes for some really cool, weird, freaked out death metal, definitely recommended!