You wouldn't have expected it after self-titled album from 1987, which was a solid but unassuming slab of French Canadian crossover thrash, but somewhere in between that debut and their second album Universe, D.B.C. (or Dead Brain Cells) took some cues from fellow Quebecois thrashers Voivod and flung themselves out into the outer fringes of thrash metal. Originally released on Combat/Rough Justice and unavailable on vinyl for over twenty years until now, their 1989 sophomore album unveiled a strange, alien new sound that was very proggy and very angular, a far cry from the straightforward attack they started out with. I'm guessing that DBC were extremely influenced by Voivod when they wrote this album, but it's not total Voivod worship either. There's a similar cold, robotic feel to the vocals and the riffs share some of the same penchant for dissonance and wonky chord structures, but there's also a weird angularity to the songs that is unique to Universe. The ten songs attempt to tackle a grandiose concept about the creation of the universe and of life on earth, human evolution and consciousness (with songs like "The Genesis Explosion", "Primordium", "Phobos And Deimos" and "Infinite Universe") through the spacey, mathy thrash rife with interesting time signature weirdness, lots of abrupt changes from straight thrash into abstract, labyrinthine riff structures and eerie, arctic leads, and many instances of crushing mid-paced chug erupting into flurries of mathy shred and jazzy offbeat drumming. I'm not suggesting that Universe hits the heights of a classic weirdo-thrash album like Dimension Haltross, but this is still an important piece of prog-thrash history from the late 80s that earned them a couple of pages in Jeff Wagner's Mean Deviation: Four Decades Of Progressive Heavy Metal alongside fellow avant-heshers Obliveon, Coroner and Voivod. It's too bad that this ended up being DBC's last album, I've always been curious as to where they would have taken their cold, futuristic thrash from here.